ANN: EvNim uses neuroevolution to evolve an ANN that plays the game of Nim

The people at ANNEvolve have been working hard again and have released EvNim 1.08. This new release fixes a bug in earlier versions. The effect was to initialize only a small part of each chromosome in the initial population, leaving most of the chromosome with zeroes. Version 1.08 will evolve faster, especially at the beginning.

EvNim uses neuroevolution to evolve an ANN that plays the game of Nim. In this version of Nim two players begin the game with 15 "beans". As the game play continues players take turns removing beans. On each turn a player may remove 1, 2 or 3 beans. Each player must remove at least one bean and may not take more than 3. The player removing the last bean loses. EvNim will evolve a perfect player of the game. This is accomplished purely by a tournament among the population of ANNs, hence the perfect player ANN is created with no game analysis by the programmer. A hand-written perfect player is used to evaluate the results, but this information is not used in any way to guide the evolution or to influence the construction of the ANNs.

Evnim is written in standard C with no extra libraries required for compilation. It is extensively documented. Much more information, and all source code, is included in the downloadable files at:

Comments and questions about EvNim may be posted on the ANNEvolve mailing list by sending email to snipped-for-privacy@lists.sourceforge.net. You may post without subscribing, but anyone may subscribe to this mailing list. The list archives may be viewed at: The ANNEvolve team is experimenting with the Evolution of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). They are combining the two fields of Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Neural Networks. Find out more about other ANN evolution programs at the Annevolve project at: [ comp.ai is moderated. To submit, just post and be patient, or if ] [ that fails mail your article to , and ] [ ask your news administrator to fix the problems with your system. ]