An evolved Seega player capable of strong novice-level play

Seega is an ancient Egyptian two-stage board game that, in certain aspects, is more difficult than chess. The two-player game is most commonly played on a 7 × 7 board, but is also sometimes played on a 5 × 5 or 9 × 9 board. In the first and more difficult stage of the game, players take turns placing one piece each on the board until the board contains only one empty cell. In the second stage players take turns moving pieces of their color; a piece that becomes surrounded by pieces of the opposite color is captured and removed from the board. A player wins when he has captured all, or all except one, of his opponent´s pieces. We present results on the evolution of a Seega player that plays at the level of college students, who have had only a few days´ familiarity with the game. The player is based on minimaxing with 12 hand-coded features, and feature weights that are evolved by a co-evolutionary system comprising a particle swarm optimizer (PSO) and an evolutionary algorithm (EA). Separate White and Black populations of feature weight vectors are maintained; each population is evaluated based on play against players from the top-, middle-, and bottom-third of the other population.