Lines of Action
Lines of Action (LOA) is played on an 8×8 board by two sides, Black and White. Each side has twelve pieces at its disposal. It is a two-person zero-sum game with perfect information. LOA is a connection game, albeit non-typical. Claude Soucie invented the game around 1960. Sid Sackson (1969) described the game in his first edition of A Gamut of Games.
The strongest LOA-playing entity in the world is the
MIA franchise developed by
Mark Winands.
MIA won the Computer Olympiads of 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2009.
Its Monte-Carlo search successor MC-LOA won the
tournament in 2013 and 2015.
More information can be found at:
https://dke.maastrichtuniversity.nl/m.winands/loa/
Key Publications:
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Winands, M.H.M., Björnsson, Y., and Saito, J-T. (2010). Monte Carlo Tree Search in Lines of Action. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games. Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 239-250.
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Winands, M.H.M. (2004). Informed Search in Complex Games. Ph.D. thesis. Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands. ISBN 90-5278-429-9. Universitaire Pers Maastricht. Received the 2004 ChessBase Best-Publication Award.
