Design and software implementation of heuristic and suboptimal strategies for the Mancala/Kalah game

Abstract

One of the oldest games worldwide – the Mancala game – is focused on in this preliminary study. Namely, its the most popular version – the Kalah game – is considered. This contribution is aimed at the analysis of Kalah rules first. Further, based on these rules, some novel deterministic and suboptimal strategies are proposed. It is proved that the order of playing has a decisive impact on winning. The proposed strategies have been implemented via a simple C++/Qt application. By experiments, a human player, when playing as the second one, cannot defend the designed strategies in general. However, the same applies in reverse – when a human player begins, he/she can nearly always win. To sum up, the proposed software-based strategies are comparable to human opponents. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.