Game playing: A couple of ideas for your project: OTHELLO
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In this project you have several goals/constraints:
- implement an othello game
- make sure that your environment is similar to the environment of the other team working on Othello
- win the game :) : i.e., implement an efficient and not too time consuming strategy (time to play will also be taken into account in the contest)

I would recommend that, besides developing the environment of your game: board / pawns / how humans can play (when they are invited to do so) / how the computer can act on the board / etc., you should develop the following two successive prototypes:
1. the first one should play very basically: during its implementation, you will make sure you feed the knowledge base with all the rules and some tricks you know, to play Othello.
2. the second one should improve the 1st one by integrating a smarter way to determine the next move (wiser than "one of the possible moves" :) ).

In parallel to this work, you will also have to:
- make sure your system can play against the other team's
- define a plan to assess the efficiency of your software (more than reporting the result of playing against the other team :) ).

You should redistribute the work, keeping in mind that everybody should be busy all the time (otherwise this is a waste of time). Don't forget that you have to define milestones at which points you will have to release deliverables... and stick to them :). The graduate student of the team should be in charge of making sure that other members will turn their work on time.