WOLVE 2008 WINS HEX TOURNAMENT

SIX, the gold medallist in each Hex competition since 2003, uses a two-ply truncated-width alpha-beta search and a Shannon-style electric-circuit evaluation function in which cell adjacencies are augmented by virtual connections. The virtual connection engine (VCE) uses Anshelevich and/or closure operations. From a list of moves to consider, SIX prunes dead cells with low degree; it also prunes cells outside of the virtual connection mustplay region, which are provably losing.