An FPGA implementation of a threat-based strategy for Connect6

In this paper, we present a strategy and an FPGA implementation of a Connect6 player submitted to the FPT 2011 Design Competition. Connect6 is a two-player strategy board game. The winner of the game is the player who first gets six pieces of his color in a connected horizontal, vertical or diagonal line. We assign a strategic value to each potential move depending on the current board configuration. Our approach uses a minimal amount of situation dependent game logic in order to take full advantage of the available compute resources and parallelism. The FPGA implementation of this strategy always wins against the software opponent provided for the competition. Additionally, our implementation wins on average against different software AIs from [1], as long as no sophisticated game-tree search is performed by the software.