Nine Men's Morris
Nine Men's Morris is a popular board game also known as Mill, Cowboy Checkers, Merrils, Mulino, Mulinello Grisia, Tris, or Filetto.
It has been chosen as benchmark for a series of research activities.
Information about the rules of the game can be found in the free resources (bottom of the page) or on the wikipedia page.
Each from 2015 to 2018, as part of the course of Foundaments of Artificial Intelligence M, groups of students have been invited to design a little prototype of an intelligent agent able to play to the game.
This challenge have made possible to acquire data which have been used for:
- The creation two datasets which can be useful to apply machine learning techniques to this game: Nine Men's Morris Good Moves Dataset
- The creation of a DeepNetworks-based system capable of playing the game without knowing its rules: Neural Nine Men's Morris
- An analysis of the usefullness of the challenge as part of the university course: Mulino Challenge
For any questions, feel free to contact professor Paola Mello (paola.mello *at* unibo.it), professor Federico Chesani (federico.chesani *at* unibo.it), or Andrea Galassi (a.galassi *at* unibo.it).
Related papers from our research group
Useful free resurces
- A Game-Based Competition as Instrument for Teaching Artificial Intelligence (pre-print version and poster of the paper)
- Can Deep Networks Learn to Play by the Rules? A Case Study on Nine Men's Morris (pre-print version of the paper)
- Symbolic versus sub-symbolic approaches: a case study on training Deep Networks to play Nine Men’s Morris game
- Ultra-Strong and Extended Solutions for Nine Men Morris, Morabaraba, and Lasker Morris
- Solving Nine Men Morris
- Nine Men’s Morris: Evaluation Functions