konnekt4 - A C implementation of the famous game with a Tcl/Tk GUI.
--------

Game engine by Baris Mestanogullari <mestanba@martin.luther.edu>
                                    <mest0002@tc.umn.edu>
GUI by Dan Gohman and Baris Mestanogullari


This is the C port of a LISP connect-4 game I wrote for an AI class in  
January 1998. I wanted to release it because I personally thought it was
a fun game and an excellent way to waste time, especially when a person 
is trying to write a senior paper.
The GUI was rewritten mostly by Dan Gohman with a few additions by myself,
and none of the GUI code given in class was used.
If you have any feedback about this game, please drop me an email.


Installation:
-------------

* Check the first line of 'konnekt4' and set it to point to your wish8.0
  if it doesn't already.
* Set "gifdir" in 'konnekt4' if you will not be running konnekt4 from the
  directory where k4banner.gif is. See the beginning of the file for more
  information.
* Edit the Makefile to suit your needs and type 'make' and 'make install'
  Make sure BINDIR is in your path. 
* Use konnekt4 to start the game.


Information about difficulty settings:
--------------------------------------

The depth-cutoff (the depth the minimax algorithm will search for the best
move) is calculated by LEVEL + the difficulty selected in the game. LEVEL
is #define'd in k4engine.c
LEVEL is set to 3 initially, which makes even the easy setting a good
challenge.  When LEVEL is 3:

Depth-cutoff in Easy = 3 + 0 = 3
                Medium = 3 + 1 = 4
                Difficult = 3 + 2 = 5

The higher the depth-cutoff, the more difficult the game gets, since the
computer will analyze more possibilities (further down the tree of possible
moves) and choose the best one among those.

If you would like to make any changes to the difficulty levels, all you 
have to do is change the number following "#define LEVEL" in k4engine.c,
recompile the file and replace the old binary with the new one.
