ANN: EvNim uses neuroevolution to evolve an ANN that plays the game of Nim

[Michael Livsey]

The people at ANNEvolve have been working hard again and have released
EvNim 1.08. This new release fixes a bug in earlier versions. The effect
was to initialize only a small part of each chromosome in the initial
population, leaving most of the chromosome with zeroes. Version 1.08
will evolve faster, especially at the beginning.

EvNim uses neuroevolution to evolve an ANN that plays the game of Nim.
In this version of Nim two players begin the game with 15 "beans". As
the game play continues players take turns removing beans. On each turn
a player may remove 1, 2 or 3 beans. Each player must remove at least
one bean and may not take more than 3. The player removing the last bean
loses. EvNim will evolve a perfect player of the game. This is
accomplished purely by a tournament among the population of ANNs, hence
the perfect player ANN is created with no game analysis by the
programmer. A hand-written perfect player is used to evaluate the
results, but this information is not used in any way to guide the
evolution or to influence the construction of the ANNs.

Evnim is written in standard C with no extra libraries required for
compilation. It is extensively documented. Much more information, and
all source code, is included in the downloadable files at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/annevolve

Comments and questions about EvNim may be posted on the ANNEvolve
mailing list by sending email to annevolve-devel at lists.sourceforge.net.
You may post without subscribing, but anyone may subscribe to this
mailing list. The list archives may be viewed at:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=32765.

The ANNEvolve team is experimenting with the Evolution of Artificial
Neural Networks (ANNs). They are combining the two fields of
Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Neural Networks. Find out more
about other ANN evolution programs at the Annevolve project at:
http://annevolve.sourceforge.net

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