Hannibal

Hannibal, by Martin Piotte and Louis Geoffroy, is a learning othello program written in 1996. According to its IOS rating and tournament results as of early 1997, it may have been about as strong as Logistello at that time. Since Logistello retired at the start of 1998, Hannibal was certainly the strongest active program at the end of the nineties.

Martin Piotte wrote to me, “Hannibal is based on very simple and elegant principles, with two or three original ideas thrown in.” Apparently it is substantially different from and simpler than other programs.

Matthew David Hills brought to my attention this post from 1996 about Hannibal. (I’ve corrected a bunch of typos and whatnot.)

Author:   Louis Geoffroy
Email:    (long since expired!)
Date:       1996/09/09
Forums:     comp.ai.games 

[...]

  Hi I'm Louis Geoffroy
 
  I'm the co-author of Hannibal, a neutral neural nets othello
program, with self-learning.  Hannibal is now the second best program
of othello on IOS, "INTERNET OTHELLO SERVER".
The other program of othello, that I co-write is Brutus which is 4th
on IOS now, and the fastest othello end-game program in the world.
 
  Brutus is based on a simple evaluation function that is minmax with
alpha-beta,PVS,pre-window,forward pruning and probability cut.  The
normal ply level in a standard game is 14 to 19 ply in middle game and
solve win/lose/draw at 23 to 27 free in end-game.  Here only 11
parameters are used in the evaluation fonction.

  But for Hannibal, all of the learning of Hannibal is based on
self-play game with a neural nets of 3 level.  The are 7 millions
equivalent neuron in the neural net use.  The Database of positions
to learn is 200 million positions self generated.  All the computing
up to now did take 3 months on a pentium-166. 

 But Hannibal do use minmax and all the other speed-up method of
Brutus, only at the end of the tree search that the new neural net
evaluation fonction is call. Hannibal do the play at same ply level as
Brutus.

  Hope it help.

                            Louis Geoffroy.

Hannibal
Martin Piotte and Louis Geoffroy
Defunct web page formerly at <http://www.cam.org/~bigjeff/Hannibal.html>. It was an overview of the program with a version history and a list of tournament results.