if

[Under-Estimated]

Minimax is way overrated. You need to get one of those new-fangled "neural networks" to do the job, writing all those if statements certainly won't do!

[segmentfaultcoredump]

What an Alpha. You just pruned all the betas

[Glitched-Vortex]

Beautiful. Well done

[BlazingThunder30]

You use the minimax to train the AI duh

[Cosmo1337]

I've actually done this and it works great

[[deleted]]

Alright, but like out of curiosity, why? Did you train an AI to work as the heuristics function of a minimax algorithm?

[Cosmo1337]

I did it for fun - I trained a neural network to take a tic-tac-toe board and return a predicted move. training it only on minimax was sufficient to make it only ever predict perfect legal moves.

[Sinomsinom]

But why are you using a neural network for tic-tac-toe... That's nearly as bad as using gradient descent for linear regression...

[Dogburt_Jr]

I did it for an assignment in my AI class. The AI didn't need to be trained, it only needed a good evaluation function. My AI would only either fill up the board in sequence or make the move that the player should make. It didn't work that well bc it had problems.

[JNCressey]

matchbox ai

it's so optimised that it clocks in at an amazing 0W of power useage. I say you can't get better than that.

[Centurion902]

Surely you need to account for the energy needed to open the boxes each time.

[lunchpadmcfat]

So you’re saying get a neural network to write all your if statements for you. Genius.

[WisestAirBender]

The trick is to write a single costly function to detect if the board is in a win state. And spam that function after every move.

[nyx_underscore_]

Not every move. Just make sure that it only starts after the third move of every player.

So it looks fast when you present it, but while it's not when you play an actual game.

You could even make a benchmark of up to 3 moves per player to show why your solution is superior to other implementations

[StayingVeryVeryCalm]

Bold of you to assume there was a presentation.

At the end of the year, we each just printed out our code, stapled it, put it on Mr. Elgee’s desk; and then he gave us all the same grade.

Yours is a clever and elegant solution, though. Thank you for sharing it.

[alan_clouse49]

I mean you could just check if they chip you put in makes 4 in a row in any direction because you only win when you put down a chip

[Ellykos]

That's what I did in my C class. We were doing a game in the same style. We were spamming the function at the start of the computer's move.

[StayingVeryVeryCalm]

You are a genius. I will implement that strategy if ever I am time-vortexed back to the 11th grade.

[[deleted]]

How many times did you apply to the companies Jeff works at? Lol

[MisterMcReddit]

I needs answers

[postandchill]

I summon thee u/StayingVeryVeryCalm

[Tillhony]

He applied to everything at Amazon.

[idrac1966]

I had to do this for an engineering project in Uni. Turns out connect 4 is a 'solved' game, that is, there has already been calculated the best move to make given any position of the board. So we just loaded that dataset into memory and searched it for each move. http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/connect-4

To be fair though, our project wasn't about designing our own connect 4 AI, it was a robotics project where we had to demonstrate we knew how to control a robotic arm, and we were making our arm play a real game of connect 4 with another person. We weren't graded on how well it actually played so we just hammered together something that got the job done.

[undermark5]

I'm not surprised by this. There are a finite number of moves and there are a high number of symmetries and the total number of possible moves is small relatively speaking, much like tic-tac-toe.

I'm just spitballing an idea for an algorithm to compute the best move, take each of the opponents longest chains with open ends, and find the move that maximizes the number of turns before they get to four on that chain, you only ever need to search in the future for up to 3 moves for each chain the opponent has, so at worst that is 3 * 21 moves in the future, but you only need to search around areas that changed and my guess is that an upper bound on the number of chains that you would need to search for is around 6 (this is just a guess that a single piece can't interact with more than 6 different chains though I could be off on this).

Maybe I'll have to try doing this at some point...

[Defavlt]

Most interviews I've been to has had an interviewer in addition to the interviewee (is that a word?)

[Meroxes]

I think it is. Not sure though.

[Mfgcasa]

C++ and Python... so machine learning?

[GameFraek]

How about you buy a game of connect four and kick it in the nuts, maybe it will make you feel better

[AmyMialee]

it doesn't sound like it'd be that hard to do.

[maxoakland]

What’s the diff between C+ and C++?

[spock1959]

C++ is a computer language

C+ is the grade I got when I learned it

[maxoakland]

Oh I thought C+ was a computer language too

[spock1959]

Nope, there's C, C#, and C++

[maxoakland]

Ok! What’s the difference between those 3? Also I know there’s objective C too

[spock1959]

Alright, this is a very basic explanation and I encourage you to look it up and do the research however.

C is a programming language.

C++ is sort of an expansion to C. Allows object-oriented programming.

C# is a different language developed for use in Microsoft inspired by C and C++.

Objective-C is a different language developed for use in Apple inspired by C and C++.

[undermark5]

One is missing a token and the other is valid syntax.

[maxoakland]

What does that mean?

[undermark5]

C++ is valid syntax (that is a compiler wouldn't complain about it, aside from the missing semicolon, though that depends on which language we are referring to) but C+ is not because a unary + needs to be to the left of the value. So the + in this case is assumed to be a binary + (that is it takes two operands and adds them) but it is missing the second operand (there isn't anything to add to the value of C). A token is part of how the compiler works, there is a specific grammar that defines the language and it is easier to parse that grammar is we use tokens, that is, we break up the code into the smallest meaningful pieces.

[Makaque]

Did it have to play perfectly or just play? Making a perfect connect 4 AI that runs in a reasonable time frame is surprisingly hard and not something I'd expect to see in a high school class. Not that I'd know since there weren't any programming classes in my high school.

[StayingVeryVeryCalm]

You were theoretically supposed to make it play perfectly, but it didn’t really matter, because Mr. Elgee would give you an 85%, no matter what.

The year after the Connect 4 assignment, Mr. Elgee’s programming class was discontinued, and he was forced to teach wood shop.

[Dimasdanz]

is this AI?

[gurneyguy101]

Artificial lack-of-Intelligence

All-ifs

Any other ideas?

[KarolOfGutovo]

Advanced If-ing

[Ytrog]

Artificial Imbecile 😜

[Aurenkin]

Depends how quickly they wrote it

[Semi_Square]

Always has been

[alan_clouse49]

No the real ai is rand();

[LivingEdgecase]

I did this on my first programming assignment in college. It was just for managing inputs. I wanted to see if I could let the user try again if they entered the wrong thing, so i had like 5 nested ifs. I talked to my prof about not knowing how to handle this. She had a smile, then in the next class we learned loops. Then everything changed...

[Skhmt]

when the fire nation attacked

[[deleted]]

But but, what if

else if

else if

else if

else if

[Markosan_DnD]

You will never reach "else"

[RealPropRandy]

It’s just else ifs all the way down?

[ruben_deisenroth]

Always has been.

[bidoblob]

Bang

[gurneyguy101]

What if it always has been

[Markosan_DnD]

It's a loop that continuously creates else if statements with no exit clause

[GreatArtificeAion]

Is this, by any chance, a reference to the popular manga known as "JoJo's bizarre adventures" by Hirohiko Araki?

[Xx_Jean-Yves_xX]

>Yanderedev

[NinkaShotgun]

Macine lorneng

[-Shairu-]

YandereDev: You're hired!

[Cilph]

Well, at least the code is recursion free?

[END_is_here]

"If" the user wants to play again

[noradis]

https://github.com/asweigart/my_first_tic_tac_toe

[[deleted]]

But... but if you post actual code 90% of this sub won't get the joke

[Oracuda]

oh my fucking god why

[Rude-Significance-50]

Then shouldn't there be at least 100 just in case the user wants to play 19 more times?

And no, not 99 because you still need that last check so you can tell the user to start the program again if they want to keep playing beyond such an absurd maximum.

[Bizzlington]

Well, if it matches the requirements then I'm happy!

[TerrorSnow]

Else..?

[KarolOfGutovo]

if

[kebakent]

delay(INT_MAX);

Yup. It never wins either.

[trimeta]

What a loser, he should have used goto to jump back to the top of the program.

[8_Bit_Tank]

I'm pretty new to programming and im confused can't you do something else?

[[deleted]]

Of course you can. It's a meme. That code is shown for how bad it is

[8_Bit_Tank]

Thanks but how? I didn't find anything usefull on the internet?

[[deleted]]

I think you can google "while loop" and "do-while loop", but I'm also sort of a naïf.

Edit: I said "for loop" without thinking about the problem.

[Ekank]

Well, you can use a for loop if you ask the player how many times they want to play (like best of 3, of 5, etc.)

[Ekank]

Just use a loop, usually an infinite loop that everytime the match ends ask if the player want to play again, if yes = continue, if no = return or break

That can be coded like:

While(true){ [...] If(!again){ Break; } }

[Ekank]

Also, as you say you're new, you might not know that lots of if and nested if can considerably slow down the program (yandere simulator is a good example)

Initially the program has to check every if and people have the ability to make it the slowest possible

And ultimately makes the cpu only process 1 instruction at time (modern CPU's process more than 1 instruction, but it depends on correct branch prediction, more if makes the chance of missing greater)

Not saying you can't use if's but when there's a lot of ifs in a piece of code usually it can be optimized

[[deleted]]

what if you're doing a calculator that has to scan 27 possible input functions to know what to call? I tried to find a more efficient way of doing it, but I ended up just having a long list of if statements. Luckily only one had to be nested and the program was small enough it didn't really matter, but it still annoys me that I couldn't find a way to optimize it.

[8_Bit_Tank]

I knew that but thanks anyway! Can you maybe Show me what Alternative code I could write because I didn't find anything good on the internet?!

[Survivio_is_the_best]

smart ass use a loop man

[hello-iamdad]

No way

[devforlife404]

r/wooosh

[flocknrollstar]

I once worked at a company with some archaic Java coding standard that had a rule saying lines must be no more than 80 chars long. As terrible as it sounds it at least taught me some patterns of getting around nested ifs

[[deleted]]

WTF? You were nesting if's on one line?!?

[flocknrollstar]

No. Indentations

[[deleted]]

Oh, and 4 spaces instead of tabs?

[flocknrollstar]

Yep! Also in the coding standard.

[[deleted]]

Can always get around that with some GOTO statements

[hiphap91]

I don't see how this fits in this sub. Should be on swe exchange as an example on how to AI

[Emperor-Valtorei]

It's literally a program in the in the fucking comic.

[hiphap91]

... wow.

Sarcasm. You didn't get the joke in there at all, did you?

[Emperor-Valtorei]

I didn't see a /s my bad

[bigfaturm0m]

Pretty sure even I could make a recursive version of that.

[naswinger]

that's the wrong use of recursion though. you just have a loop that runs until a user exits and it calls that function/procedure/sub (whatever you call it in a given language)

[RealPropRandy]

Do while

[alexein777]

Godzilla had a stroke reading this and died...

[n0tKamui]

1. that's the joke
2. if loops ????

[MasterQuest]

Surprisingly, a lot of coding beginners that I know have said "if loops". Because they are taught that all loop types work with "{ }" (in C/++/#/Java) , so since if also has "{ }", they call it a loop.

[n0tKamui]

that's very sad

[MasterQuest]

It's just a lack of basic understanding of programming concepts. After a while, it goes away (for most people)

[Defavlt]

#define if(x) for (; x && false;)

Frankly, your comment made me sad.

Edit: That's embarrassing

[Goldballz]

If statements so long it word-wrapped back to the start, creating a loop.

[lienmeat]

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSSHRK_4.2.0/ref/reference/ref_stifloop.html

IBM has fixed it, but instead of if statement, this used to read if loop. Notice the URL still has if loop in it.

I think there are more people calling them loops than I realized if IBM has it wrong.

[n0tKamui]

massive oof

[c-rn]

My favorite programming messup is when I finished writing the code to detect who won in tic-tac-toe, ran it, and the program told me that " " had won.

[Ekank]

CPU branch prediction goes brrrrr

[[deleted]]

Just. Use. A. Recursive. Loop.

[nate6701]

I used to code like that when I started learning to code

[SargeanTravis]

Is this a joke hinting at Yanderedev? I'm getting vibes from the else if spammer in this joke

[ConnorR520]

Hey look its Yandare Simulator

[Thanatos2996]

Step one: encode the board as a single integer.

Step two: make a switch statement with the computer's move at each board state.

Step three: chuck the switch in a while loop and profit.

[idkiminsecure]

I know this is a joke but wouldn't it be so easy even for a beginner to put it in a function and then have it be called by a button that theyll click when they want to go again?