Hex Game

An in-progress implementation of Hex for Linux supporting pluggable AIs. Write your own and submit a PR!

Core Components

hextk

A Tk-based GUI program for playing Hex with zero, one, or two AI players. Uses the hexmon program to actually play games.

hexmon

A host program for Hex AIs, used as a backend for hextk.

libhex

A C library / Tcl extension providing an implementation of a Hex board. This is the implementation used by the game host, but AI implementations may also choose to use it.

AI Implementations

Listed in alphabetical order.

disruptor

Doesn't play especially well, as it only does one move of lookahead. At least it's better than dummy. Written by Jonathan Page in Chicken Scheme.

dummy

Plays particularly badly. Originally written to test hexmon, before there were any other implementations. Anybody could have written it and sadly, someone did, in C.

Architecture

hextk is implemented as a Tcl/Tk program which, after providing an opportunity to configure the game, launches an instance of hexmon as a child process, and then communicates with it over its stdin/stdout.

The command line provided to hexmon is as follows:

hexmon size color path [opts...]

where size is the board size, color is red or blue, path is the path to a shared object implementing the AI, and opts are additional options which will be passed to the AI init function.

To avoid symbol clashes, hexmon only depends on libc and ldl, It communicates with hextk in a line-oriented fashion. It accepts the following commands:

• move boardstate where boardstate is a dump of the board. The coordinates to play in are echoed back on stdout.

• quit boardstate where boardstate is a dump of the board. No response is returned and the program exits.

See hexmon.h for the AI ABI.