Interested in buying decent Hex game AI algorythm

[Lehmund]

Hello,

My name is Sylvain, and I head Sylien Games, a small strategy game company based out of Ottawa.

We currently are interested in buying algorithm code from one of you if you already have done. It can be in any language though some languages are preferred. The more basic and versatile the language it is, the better (C/C++, wireless phone languages, web languages like PHP and others etc.... are all good).

You must be able to demonstrate the AI to us through web or other means (we need to play it a while to see how it reacts to different strategies).

It need not be the best one out there, just decent for a starting player to make his teeth on it.

Please send a PM to my account here or reply to this thread with responses. Further information will be given out to each submission originator in a case by case basis.

We've already contacted several individuals and small companies with this today and are awaiting proposals and submissions.

The arrangement would be as follows (more details would be revealed in private when needed):

1. We want a non-exclusive, no-restriction rights license to use however we want the algorithm provided. Which means you can "sell" or use your code as you like after we buy it from you and we can do whatever we want with it on our end as well.

2. We will pay cold hard cash for the algorithm codes. The less work that is needed to adapt it to our immediate use, the more we'll be willing to hand out. We will only pick up the best candidate out of those that respond to this call. Period.

We will have other needs for AIs for other games in the near future, so those of you who like AI work and have done some in the past, please feel free to post in this thread or contact us with what you've done, and demos on other games too. We'll need more good AIs for other games we have and wish to make into single player this year as well.

Cheers! and good luck to all.

Sylvain
www.sylien.com

[DemonWasp]

That's...remarkably vague. Did you want:
1. A pathfinding / movement algorithm.
2. A distance / detection algorithm.
3. A full "unit" AI

Both 1 and 2 can be found relatively trivially on the internet, so I can only assume you wanted #3. However, you haven't given us nearly enough information to actually write anything. How do units move on this hex grid? Do units attack, and if so how do they attack? Do units interact in any other way than attacking? Are units required to move, or can they sit still? Can multiple units share the same space? If play real-time or turn-based?

Also, and most importantly, you haven't even given a range of how much money would be awarded for this. Given what I've said above, I'd guess that no less than $5000 is a safe bet for a decent AI. That'd buy you about a month of my time, and I'm a junior programmer. An experienced AI programmer (and their correspondingly-superior AI) would be at least $10000.

[chrisbrown]

I think he's refering to the board game called Hex.

[DtY]

Looks like Go? I doubt you'll get a decent AI.

[yoursecretninja]

Quote:

Looks like Go? I doubt you'll get a decent AI.

'

This a very difficult game to solve. You should see the research that has been done on trying to find solutions, as well as creating AI players. Pretty crazy stuff. Anyway, it will certainly be difficult to get a decent AI, especially when looking to pick one up on the cheap.

[Lehmund]

Hello all.

We are looking for a fully pluggable AI that will play a decent Hex game (yes the board game, sorry I was not precise enough here). I've been in the business long enough to know that full Hex AIs are not plentiful and available on the web. Otherwise, I wouldn't be posting here.

There are however many people that like to code and have created some decent AIs both as projects and as part of their Hex game ideas. We have our own programmers and our own contracting companies we use. We're not looking to hire another programmer to create the AI according to specs. We want to buy something that's already done and laying around in some guy's PC at the moment. In other words, we can make it ourselves if we had the time, but its low enough priority that our people are busy at other things right now, yet time to coordinate with the rest of the people is short enough that I'd rather just purchase a license from someone who already made a decent one.

I can tell you, there are at least a handful of people that I "know" have designed decent playable AIs for Hex. I simply am shooting it off here to see if anyone on the CS Canada forum has one or know of someone that does that would be willing to provide a license in a cash deal.

If none can be found, we'll just contract it out to our partners or make it ourselves....

Hope that clears things up?

Timeline is about 2 weeks to have one on board and it doesn't even need to be that good at all. We'll pick it up wherever a programmer left off if need be. no biggie. Given the availability of options we have, we'll be willing to offer maybe $200 for a non-exclusive license, not much more unless its worth it. So you can see that its nowhere near any price range expected to hire a person to make a brand new one.

Anyway, we got a bunch of games that will eventually need single player modes on standby and for most of them we'll proceed the same way or make it ourselves depending on the situation.

Cheers and have a nice day guys!

Sylvain

[mirhagk]

I'm assuming the time line has passed already.... If you do need something in the future, I'd love to work on it, I'm a good programmer who currently just experiments with ideas for fun, but I want to program more, which means I'd have to quit my part time job, which means I'd have to be able to sell some of my programs or something.

[Lehmund]

Well, we have yet to receive goods on this project but had a couple decent proposals so far for Hex AI.

We are always looking out for excellent talent out there, and why not?

Our most pressing need is for a good strategy game AI developper or iPhone game developper. If you have experience with either, perhaps we can talk?

At this particular moment, we're especially interested in bits of code we can simply purchase off people to finish off a couple projects easily while we're working on other stuff. We're just too few to code everything and why not use other people's good code instead of making our own sometimes eh?

Anyway, any specific proposals can go to PM, I'm open to cool ideas, code and people.