Home * Games * Connect Four

		Connect Four, (Connect-Four, Connect 4, The Captain's Mistress, Four in a Row, Four in a Line) a tic-tac-toe like game in which two players drop discs into a 7x6 board. The first player to get four in a row, either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, wins. The game was known as The Captain's Mistress, released in its current form by Milton Bradley in 1974 (Milton Bradley was acquired by Hasbro in 1984). Connect Four was first (weakly) solved by James D. Allen as announced in a rec.games.programmer posting on October 01, 1988 ^[1], and only 15 days later, Victor Allis announced his independently discovered solution ^[2], described in his thesis ^[3].
Hasbro's Connect 4 ^[4]

Selected Publications

1988 ...

Victor Allis (1988). A Knowledge-Based Approach of Connect Four: The Game is Over, White to Move Wins. M.Sc. Thesis, Report No. IR-163, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universteit, Amsterdam
Jos Uiterwijk, Jaap van den Herik, Victor Allis (1989). A Knowledge-Based Approach to Connect Four: The Game is Over, White to Move Wins. Heuristic Programming in AI 1
James D. Allen (1989). A note on the Computer Solution of Connect Four. Heuristic Programming in AI 1

James D. Allen (1990). Expert Play in Connect-Four. hosted by John Tromp
James D. Allen (1990). The Complete Book of CONNECT 4. Sterling Publishing

Hendrik Baier (2006). Der Alpha-Beta-Algorithmus und Erweiterungen bei Vier Gewinnt. Bachelor's thesis (German), TU Darmstadt, advisor Johannes Fürnkranz, pdf

James D. Allen (2010 ). The Complete Book of CONNECT 4: History, Strategy, Puzzles. 2nd edition, Sterling Publishing
Yoshiaki Yamaguchi, Kazunori Yamaguchi, Tetsuro Tanaka, Tomoyuki Kaneko (2011). Infinite Connect-Four Is Solved: Draw. Advances in Computer Games 13
Yoshiaki Yamaguchi, Tetsuro Tanaka, Kazunori Yamaguchi (2013). Cylinder-Infinite-Connect-Four except for Widths 2, 6, and 11 is Solved: Drawn. CG 2013
Yoshiaki Yamaguchi, Todd W. Neller (2015). First Player’s Cannot-Lose Strategy in Cylinder-Infinite-Connect-Four for Widths 2 and 6. Advances in Computer Games 14

^ John's Connect Four Playground by John Tromp
^ AI program solves Connect Four by Victor Allis, rec.games.programmer, October 16, 1988
^ Victor Allis (1988). A Knowledge-Based Approach of Connect Four: The Game is Over, White to Move Wins. M.Sc. Thesis, Report No. IR-163, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universteit, Amsterdam
^ Hasbro's 2015 package and board for the trademarked Connect 4 game, © Hasbro, from Connect Four from Wikipedia, Fair use
^ Connect 4 AlphaZero implemented using Python... by Steve Maughan, CCC, January 29, 2018

Up one Level