MACHINE AS ONE PLAYER IN INDIAN COWRY BOARD GAME: ADVANCED PLAYING STRATEGIES

Cowry game, also known as Chowka Bhara, is an ancient board game originated in India. It is a 2-4 player strategic race game which contains an element of chance due to the throw of special dice (cowry shells). This game involves reasoning under uncertainty and stochasticity, and the decisions have to be made based on incomplete knowledge. Therefore, it may be regarded as a suitable domain for exploring various approaches in real-time strategic decision-making. This research investigates the potential for an artificially intelligent Cowry game player, capable of playing on a high-performing level against human opponents. We propose and implement a few advanced playing strategies for the game, and analyze their effectiveness based on different performance measures. We also provide an experimental comparison between the proposed advanced strategies and the basic strategies that we developed in our earlier work. The analysis of playing strategies presented in this paper can be used for evolving more sophisticated strategies, and may eventually lead to the development of an adaptive artificial player for Cowry game and similar race games