AHEM

AHEM (Adam's Happy Electronic Morabaraba), is a free, graphical, cross-platform Morabaraba-playing program. Built on advanced technologies and years of experience developing Chess, Draughts and Abalone playing programs, AHEM is a very strong Morabaraba opponent, designed to test the best human and computer players. Unfortunately, it hasn't had much opportunity to do this yet, as there seem to be no other Morabaraba computer programs which fully-support the proper rules.

In spite of the immense effort (6 public releases since early-2005, thousands of lines of code, a little blood, ample sweat and a river of tears) which has gone into making AHEM the Morabaraba powerhouse that it is, AHEM is available for free (as AHEM is published with source code under the GPL, it will always be free) to all, and runs on Windows and Linux machines (and probably also MacOS X with a bit of tinkering, but I don't have an Apple to tinker with!). AHEM offers the following key features:

• Ability to play against the computer at different levels of strength. The engine is believed to be competitive at a high standard of play, but has not as yet been tested against top players under tournament conditions.
• Set up test positions, take back moves and try different tactics
• An easy-to-use graphical use interface.
• Cross-platform support (runs on Windows and Linux, should be very easy to port to Mac OS/X, but I don't have a Mac).

I am hard at work adding new features which will make AHEM even more useful to the serious Morabaraba player, including:

• A Free Internet Morabaraba Server, allowing people to play Morabaraba over the Internet at no cost.
• The ability to create, search, publish and share databases of Morabaraba games, so that we can learn from reviewing master games.
• Tools to easily create diagrams of Morabaraba positions, to make it easy for coaches and expert players to share their thoughts.

Of course, these new features will also be free!

Current Release

Release 0.7, published on 29 July 2007, added the following:

• No changes to the playing engine
• Completely new GUI
• Ability to set up positions
• Ability to take back moves
• Board implemented as a reuseable control
• Now easy to create different visual "themes"

Plans for Future Releases

Because I have a real job, my abillity to work on Morabaraba software is a lot more constrained than I would prefer. I also tend to work on what is interesting to me at the time, which means that the time between release is variable, and the content of releases is also variable (ranging from incremental changes to the GUI to massive developments in the AI). Here are some of the things which might end up in future releases:

• Bindings to PHP, and new AJAX web-based GUI
• Support other variants (eg Nine Men's Morris, Sesotho Morabaraba, maybe even Shax)
• Ability to visually set up a position in the GUI
• Completed Free Internet Morabaraba Server
• Integrate FIMS client capabilities into the GUI
• Allow the AHEM engine to play on FIMS
• Opening library (long-range)
• Ending database (long-range)
• PalmOS/PocketPC versions