Louis Victor Allis (born 19 May 1965) is a Dutch computer scientist and co-founder of the election information technology firm Activote.[1] In his graduate work, he revealed AI solutions for Connect Four,[2][3]Qubic, and Gomoku.[4] His dissertation introduced two new game search techniques: proof-number search and dependency-based search.[5] Proof-number search has seen further successful application in computer Go tactical search and many other games.[6]
He started his career in 1987 as a freelance teacher, course developer and mentor of various AMBI courses for NOVI.[citation needed] Allis has lectured at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam as an assistant professor in artificial intelligence.[citation needed] In 1992, his program Victoria won the 4th Computer Olympiad in the game of Gomoku without losing a single game.[7] His programs had also won first places at the Computer Olympiad in games of Connect Four (1989), Awari (1990, 1991, 1992), and Qubic (1991), thus making him winner of all four early Computer Olympiads. He co-authored a solution of 4×4×4 Qubic game using his proof-number search technique.[8]
In 1995 he joined Bolesian (a knowledge technology firm in the Netherlands which is a daughter company of Capgemini and specialized in developing advanced systems based on artificial intelligence) as a senior consultant and manager.[citation needed] In 1997 he co-founded Quintiq and was appointed as the company's CEO.[citation needed]
Allis relocated to the Philadelphia office Quintiq in 2010, remaining CEO and a co-owner.[9] Quintiq was acquired by Dassault Systemes in July 2014.[10]
In 2019, Allis and Sara Gifford co-founded Activote, a Boston-based election information technology company.[1]
↑ Saito, Jahn-Takeshi; Chaslot, Guillaume; Uiterwijk, Jos W. H. M.; Van den Herik, H. Jaap (2007). "Monte-Carlo Proof-Number Search for Computer Go". Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol.4630. pp.50–61. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-75538-8_5. ISBN978-3-540-75537-1.
↑ L .V. Allis & P. N. A. Schoo (1992). "Qubic solved again". In H. J. van den Herik & L. V. Allis (eds.). Heuristic Programming in Artificial Intelligence 3: The Third Computer Olympiad. Ellis Horwood, Chichester, UK. pp.192–204.
Gomoku, also called Five in a Row, is an abstract strategy board game. It is traditionally played with Go pieces on a 15×15 Go board while in the past a 19×19 board was standard. Because pieces are typically not moved or removed from the board, gomoku may also be played as a paper-and-pencil game. The game is known in several countries under different names.
Hex is a two player abstract strategy board game in which players attempt to connect opposite sides of a rhombus-shaped board made of hexagonal cells. Hex was invented by mathematician and poet Piet Hein in 1942 and later rediscovered and popularized by John Nash.
A solved game is a game whose outcome can be correctly predicted from any position, assuming that both players play perfectly. This concept is usually applied to abstract strategy games, and especially to games with full information and no element of chance; solving such a game may use combinatorial game theory and/or computer assistance.
The Computer Olympiad is a multi-games event in which computer programs compete against each other. For many games, the Computer Olympiads are an opportunity to claim the "world's best computer player" title. First contested in 1989, the majority of the games are board games but other games such as bridge take place as well. In 2010, several puzzles were included in the competition.
International draughts is a strategy board game for two players, one of the variants of draughts. The gameboard comprises 10×10 squares in alternating dark and light colours, of which only the 50 dark squares are used. Each player has 20 pieces, light for one player and dark for the other, at opposite sides of the board. In conventional diagrams, the board is displayed with the light pieces at the bottom; in this orientation, the lower-left corner square must be dark.
Connect Four is a game in which the players choose a color and then take turns dropping colored tokens into a six-row, seven-column vertically suspended grid. The pieces fall straight down, occupying the lowest available space within the column. The objective of the game is to be the first to form a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line of four of one's own tokens. It is therefore a type of m,n,k-game with restricted piece placement. Connect Four is a solved game. The first player can always win by playing the right moves.
Combinatorial game theory measures game complexity in several ways:
State-space complexity,
Game tree size,
Decision complexity,
Game-tree complexity,
Computational complexity.
An m,n,k-game is an abstract board game in which two players take turns in placing a stone of their color on an m-by-n board, the winner being the player who first gets k stones of their own color in a row, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Thus, tic-tac-toe is the 3,3,3-game and free-style gomoku is the 15,15,5-game. An m,n,k-game is also called a k-in-a-row game on an m-by-n board.
3D tic-tac-toe, also known by the trade name Qubic, is an abstract strategy board game, generally for two players. It is similar in concept to traditional tic-tac-toe but is played in a cubical array of cells, usually 4×4×4. Players take turns placing their markers in blank cells in the array. The first player to achieve four of their own markers in a row wins. The winning row can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal on a single board as in regular tic-tac-toe, or vertically in a column, or a diagonal line through four boards.
Connect6 introduced in 2003 by Professor I-Chen Wu at Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, is a two-player strategy game similar to Gomoku.
The Shannon number, named after the American mathematician Claude Shannon, is a conservative lower bound of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10120, based on an average of about 103 possibilities for a pair of moves consisting of a move for White followed by a move for Black, and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves.
Frank van Harmelen is a Dutch computer scientist and professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was scientific director of the LarKC project (2008-2011), "aiming to develop the Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for very large scale semantic web reasoning."
In combinatorial game theory, a two-player deterministic perfect information turn-based game is a first-player-win if with perfect play the first player to move can always force a win. Similarly, a game is second-player-win if with perfect play the second player to move can always force a win. With perfect play, if neither side can force a win, the game is a draw.
Proof-number search is a game tree search algorithm invented by Victor Allis, with applications mostly in endgame solvers, but also for sub-goals during games.
Quintiq is a Dutch company that develops planning, scheduling and supply chain optimization software. The company is headquartered in 's-Hertogenbosch and its North American headquarters are in Radnor, Pennsylvania. As of October 2014, the company is known as DELMIA Quintiq.
In computer science, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a heuristic search algorithm for some kinds of decision processes, most notably those employed in software that plays board games. In that context MCTS is used to solve the game tree.
Hendrik Jacob (Jaap) van den Herik is a Dutch computer scientist, and professor at the University of Leiden, known for his contribution in the fields of computer chess and artificial intelligence.
Ingo Althöfer is a German mathematician and former professor of operations research at the University of Jena.
Octi is an abstract strategy game designed by Donald Green for 2 or 4 players. The game was first published in 1999 by The Great American Trading Company.
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