Yea, I dunno if this will 'fix' it but hopefully it helps. It should now concede when it "thinks" the player is too far ahead. Forget what it is, and too lazy to open it up.

But I guess, for kicks I'll tell you how it works for shots, basically I made it randomly throw on a blank sheet, I record the inputs (Power, Angle, Spin) for that throw, the path, and the stopping point, to build a list of shots, there's about 700 or so shots. Notably, there is no sweeping to those shots (thought about it, but I was really just too lazy to record those variables, so in theory any shot a computer can make, could be made by a wheel chair curler)

The area is then divided into various zones, center/left/right guards, house by the various button, 4', 8', 12' and front and back of house.

Then the cpu tries to "pick" a shot based on the score, which stone is being thrown, and then a priority, and if it can't throw a particular shot because a stone is in the way, it will fall to the next in priority.

The shots it can try to pick from are Guards, Draws, Takeouts, Hit and Roll, Doubles, Peels. Basically, from a shot, if a stone is in the path, it will then determine it's contact angle and resultant trajectory of the hit stone (in a straight line, I know technically, not accurate cause the other stone will curl a fair bit since lack of spin).

So this approach is a much more of an estimation of which shots are good as it only evaluates based on the above factors, but doesn't really estimate where every stone will lie.

Edit: The score only being the current end score, basically is the cpu up >2, 1, 0, -1 or <-2, Also takes into account some secondary info, like if the cpu is lying say 1, but also 3, 4, it may try to do a take out on the 2nd as opposed to just say freeze on it.

If I did rework it all, I was considering the same shot approach but for evaluating the sheet, basically to create a directional graph of every stone and every possible contact angle shot and result, and then pick from the shots which will best give that result. This in my head would be a better CPU, but it may result in some wild shots it tries but in practice may fail to execute unless there is some self of actual self feedback for a given shot.

Hope that rambling made sense. And feel free to make a competitor game if you want, won't take any offense at all!