Exploration and analysis of the evolution of strategies for Mancala variants

Abstract

This paper describes approaches to evolving strategies for Mancala variants. The results are compared and the robustness of both the strategies and heuristics across variants of Mancala is analysed. The aim of this research is to evaluate the performance of a collection of heuristics across a selection of Mancala games. The performance of the individual heuristics can be evaluated on games with varying rules regarding capture rules, varying number of pits per row and for different seeds per pit at the start of the game.