Increasing assignment motivation using a game Al tournament

Introduction Programming assignments are usually strict, which might be demotivating. In this note we describe a rather successful attempt at giving students in a secondary algorithms course a somewhat open assignment that required them to evaluate and use a broad range of programming concepts and ideas. Othello is a zero-sum board game with simple rules but advanced strategy, and AIs for this game is a well researched topic [3, 1]. Creating a successful AI involves considerations of programming topics ranging from data structure optimization, through sorting, hashing and recursion to tree pruning and genetic programming.