Connect Four (also known as Four Up, Plot Four, Find Four, Captain's Mistress, Four in a Row, Drop Four, and Gravitrips in the Soviet Union) is a two-...
Connect Four (also known as Four Up, Plot Four, Find Four, Captain's Mistress, Four in a Row, Drop Four, and Gravitrips in the Soviet Union) is a two-player connection board game, in which the players choose a color and then take turns dropping colored discs into a seven-column, six-row 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 discs. Connect Four is a solved game. The first player can always win by playing the right moves.
The game was first sold under the Connect Four trademark by Milton Bradley in February 1974.
Connect Four is a two-player game with perfect information for both sides. This term describes games where one player at a time plays, players have all the information about moves that have taken place and all moves that can take place, for a given game state. Connect Four also belongs to the classification of an adversarial, zero-sum game, since a player's advantage is an opponent's disadvantage.
One measure of complexity of the Connect Four game is the number of possible games board positions. For classic Connect Four played on 6 high, 7 wide grid, there are 4,531,985,219,092 positions for all game boards populated with 0 to 42 pieces.
The game was first solved by James Dow Allen (October 1, 1988), and independently by Victor Allis (October 16, 1988).
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HEX
Hex is a two player abstract strategy board game in which players attempt to connect opposite sides of a hexagonal board. Hex was invented by mathemat...
Hex is a two player abstract strategy board game in which players attempt to connect opposite sides of a hexagonal board. Hex was invented by mathematician and poet Piet Hein in 1942 and independently by John Nash in 1948.
It is traditionally played on an 11×11 rhombus board, although 13×13 and 19×19 boards are also popular. Each player is assigned a pair of opposite sides of the board which they must try to connect by taking turns placing a stone of their color onto any empty space. Once placed, the stones are unable to be moved or removed. A player wins when they successfully connect their sides together through a chain of adjacent stones. Draws are impossible in Hex due to the topology of the game board.
The game has deep strategy, sharp tactics and a profound mathematical underpinning related to the Brouwer fixed-point theorem. The game was first marketed as a board game in Denmark under the name Con-tac-tix, and Parker Brothers marketed a version of it in 1952 called Hex; they are no longer in production. Hex can also be played with paper and pencil on hexagonally ruled graph paper.
Hex-related research is current in the areas of topology, graph and matroid theory, combinatorics, game theory and artificial intelligence.
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