Aualé
L'aualé és un membre de la gran família de jocs de manqala, que es juga tradicionalment al nord del Golf de Guinea, des del Camerun fins al Senegal, amb petites variants locals. També es juga a les Antilles, on va ser portat pels africans que hi van anar a parar com a esclaus provinents d'aquestes mateixes zones.
Per cert,
"Awari has been reported to be solved as of May 2002, by Henri Bal and John Romein at the Free University in Amsterdam, Netherlands. They used a distributed system with 144 PCs and more than 700 Gb of RAM to compute all databases up to 48 stones, thus enumerating all possible positions in the game.
With perfect play, Awari is a draw."
As read inhttp://games.cs.ualberta.ca/~awari/
O sigui, que l'aualé està solucionat, i que si jugues perfecte és un empat. Per cert, algú sap si això implica que no hi ha avantatge en qui comença?
I unes preguntes que li vam fer al John Romein:
1) Is there only one path to reach the draw with perfect play?
No, probably there are millions of perfect games. I would not be surprised if there are perfect games that end by a repeated position without a single stone being captured.
2) What is the shortest perfect game? How many moves and what moves...
These kind of things still have to be determined. Analyzing the databases is particulary difficult, because they are distributed over an entire computer cluster, and because they are too large to be kept in main memory.
3) Have you published it in any web page? Elsewhere?
We have a paper that is currently being reviewed. Next week I will resume working on a web server:
4) Have you used international rules (you can not wipe out all the oponent seeds. If you do such a move you take nothing).
I disallow these moves. The rules I use are the same as other researchers use, and are described on