lonnen / astragalus Goto Github PK

Lonnen-Otis Notation (LON) is a trivial encoding of the game boards into an array. The game boards accepts all three of the following as different, valid states:

| 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 0 | 3 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |

| 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 3 | 0 |

| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 0 | 3 | 0 |

While they all sum the same, only [1] would appear in the game Cult of the Lamb (CotL) because 0's are always pushed to the end of the row.

For the sake of memory over many positions, and writing an AI to leverage that, it would be an improvement if we always reduced these to a canonical form. Perhaps:

| 0 | 3 | 0 |
| 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |

Where each column is sorted largest to smallest. This makes it easier to detect 0s (legal moves), and ensures that all 4 of these boards are treated as equivalent.

I think astragalus should accept any board state that might appear in CotL, but store and output a canonical form. This wouldn't change any output advice since a good or bad move is agnostic to the ordering or items in the same column.