Blokus Duo engine on a Zynq

Abstract

In this article, we present a design of a Blokus Duo engine for the ICFPT 2014 Design Competition. Our design is implemented on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC ZC706 Evaluation Kit and we employ the minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning. The ARM processor runs the search algorithm, and the handwritten hardware accelerator calculate within 1 second under the competition constraint. One of the keys to a stronger Blokus Duo player is to evaluate more states of a game; our Blokus Duo engine evaluates 12.3 times as many nodes of a game search tree as the Intel Core i7-3770T.