Wow 2 weeks

How time flies. Turkey came and went, no big surprise there. Except that we did absolutely nothing. First time ever in my entire life, I did absolutely nothing for turkey day (and I imagine the same can be said for Mrs Megos). We had the day off from work (obviously) and basically just goofed off. No big dinner. No family over (or going to). No shopping the next day (God what an awful time that is - 2nd week working my first job I got stuck working that Friday - retail no less - and it sucked, but that's a whole other story).

Anyrate, I completed the first version of my AI Checkers game in Flash. It looks a whopping 3 moves ahead (Ooooo look out!). Why only 3 moves? Well, because Flash sucks. And sucks hard. Its fantastic for slapping together some animation quickly, or even doing card games, but just forget it when you want to crunch lots and lots of numbers quickly. At 3 moves ahead, on my p4 2.6 it took about a minute (or even two!) to come up with a move. This was just a basic minmax sequence. Upon further reflection, I think I could speed it up a bit more with some more work, but I dont think its quite worth it (and my effort to tweak it further won't be compensated). I could push it to four, five, six, whatever with some tree pruning, and make the times bearable for the extremely, but like I just said, such efforts would go unrewarded at this point. Word to the wise, if you really want to make an AI checkers to be delivered on the web (or a client) go with Java if you want a platform independant solution. I imagine Shockwave would also suffice, as some of the games I've played were quite nice, and as such, it just has to be exponentially better than Flash when it comes to handling data and such. After all, Shockwave even moved to 3d!