Like many inventions:- the lightbulb, flushing lavatories, and sliced bread; this project was born of necessity. But, perhaps, unlike the aforementioned, we had the less noble motive of conquering the world playing Risk.

You see, the problem was this. Risk is a game that fundamentally requires 3 or more people. We tried the 2 player version, and basically it becomes a 2 ½ player game. In the “2 player game”, you instantiate a “neutral”, whose job is basically to sit on the map as the human players beat him/her/it (to avoid personalizing machinery) to a pulp, and it doesn’t fight back. While that may appeal to some of our sadistic tendencies, in general it was somewhat unsatisfying. Something was missing.

So we needed 3 players, at least. And we only had 2. (The two people who worked on this project.) 2!=3. It wasn’t often that we would be able to find other players willing to devote the 4-8 hours to conquer the world. (And as we approached the middle of the semester, even Dave refused to play unless he was allowed to use his “uber-totally-unbeatable-dice-rolling” trick.)

So we decided to do something about the matter. (I guess it’s part of being an engineer.) We decided to come up with an intelligent agent for Risk.

The Plan
The Goods
A copy of our report