Before chess came to Northern Europe there was Tafl, a family of asymmetric strategy board games associated strongly with the Vikings. The purpose of this paper is to study the combinatorial state-space complexity of an Irish variation of Tafl called Brandubh. Brandubh was chosen because of its asymmetric goals for the two players, but also its overall complexity well below that of chess, which should make it tractable for strong solving. Brandubh's rules and characteristics are used to gain an understanding of the overall state-space complexity of the game. State-spaces will consider valid piece positions, a generalized rule set, and accepted final state conditions. From these states the upper bound for the complexity of strongly solving Brandubh is derived. Great effort has been placed on thoroughly accounting for all potential states and excluding invalid ones for the game. Overall, the upper bound complexity for solving the game is around 10 14 states, between that of connect four and draughts (checkers).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.