Strongly Solving $7 \times 6$ Connect-Four on Consumer Grade Hardware
This provides a complete solution for Connect-Four players and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing symbolic methods.
The paper tackled the problem of generating a strong solution look-up table for the standard 7x6 Connect-Four game, previously considered infeasible, by using a symbolic search method based on binary decision diagrams, resulting in an 89.6 GB table produced in 47 hours on consumer hardware.
While the game Connect-Four has been solved mathematically and the best move can be effectively computed with search based methods, a strong solution in the form of a look-up table was believed to be infeasible. In this paper, we revisit a symbolic search method based on binary decision diagrams to produce strong solutions. With our efficient implementation we were able to produce a 89.6 GB large look-up table in 47 hours on a single CPU core with 128 GB main memory for the standard $7 \times 6$ board size. In addition to this win-draw-loss evaluation, we include an alpha-beta search in our open source artifact to find the move which achieves the fastest win or slowest loss.