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		Bao, a traditional mancala board game played in most of East Africa, most popular among the Swahili people of Tanzania, especially Zanzibar and Kenya. Bao is the swahili word for board or board game. ^[1] . Bao is a two-player abstract strategy game, and considered as one of the most complex mancala games. The Bao board has four rows of eight pits, each player owns two adjacent rows.
Initial setup in Bao la kiswahili ^[2]

Bao 0.1

Bao 0.1 is a Bao playing program by Jeroen Donkers running under Windows ^[3] :

Selected Publications

Philip Townshend (1978). Games of Strategy: A new Look at Correlates. The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, Vol. 4, No. 4
Philip Townshend (1979). Anthropological perspectives on bao (mankala) games. Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, amazon

Philip Townshend (1982). Bao (mankala): the Swahili ethic in African idiom. Paideuma 28
Alex de Voogt (1995). Limits of the Mind: Towards a Characterisation of Bao Mastership. Ph.D. Thesis, CNWS Publications

Alex de Voogt (2002). Reproducing board game positions: Western Chess and African Bao. Swiss Journal of Psychology, Vol. 61, No. 4
Jeroen Donkers, Jos Uiterwijk, Alex de Voogt (2002). Mancala Games - Topics in Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. Step by Step. Proceedings of the 4th Colloquium ‘Board Games in Academia’ (eds. Jean Retschitzki and Rosita Haddad-Zubel), Editions Universitaires, Fribourg, Switzerland, pp. 133–146.
Jeroen Donkers, Jos Uiterwijk (2002). Programming Bao. 7th Computer Olympiad Workshop, pdf
Jeroen Donkers, Jaap van den Herik, Jos Uiterwijk (2003). Opponent Models in Bao: Conditions of a Successfull Application, Advances in Computer Games 10, pdf
Alex de Voogt (2003). Muyaka's poetry in the history of Bao. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 66, No. 1
Jeroen Donkers, Jaap van den Herik, Jos Uiterwijk (2004). Probabilistic Opponent-Model Search in Bao. (M. Rauterberg, ed.) Proceedings International Conference on Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2004. LNCS 3166, Springer, Berlin. pp. 409-419. pdf

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