Open Source Julia Board Games

Beyond its much publicized success in attaining superhuman level at games such as Chess and Go, DeepMind's AlphaZero algorithm illustrates a more general methodology of combining learning and search to explore large combinatorial spaces effectively. We believe that this methodology can have exciting applications in many different research areas. Because AlphaZero is resource-hungry, successful open-source implementations (such as Leela Zero) are written in low-level languages (such as C++) and optimized for highly distributed computing environments. This makes them hardly accessible for students, researchers and hackers. Many simple Python implementations can be found on Github, but none of them is able to beat a reasonable baseline on games such as Othello or Connect Four. As an illustration, the benchmark in the README of the most popular of them only features a random baseline, along with a greedy baseline that does not appear to be significantly stronger.