A Board Game That Actually Plays Back
I did not want another game AI repo that only prints a score and asks you to believe it. connectpuct has the engine, the search agent, the benchmark, and a browser page you can open and get humbled by in under a minute.
The game is Connect Four because the tactics are simple enough to inspect and deep enough to punish a lazy agent. Immediate wins matter. Blocks matter. Center control matters. Search has to weigh all three in real time, no hiding behind a big model.
Search With Priors, Not Vibes
The Python agent uses PUCT-style Monte Carlo tree search. Priors favor center columns, immediate wins, and tactical blocks, then rollouts settle whatever the priors couldn't decide on their own.
The web game is dependency-free, no server and no build step. The benchmark pits the search agent against random and center-first baselines, so the result is a scoreline, not a screenshot with a board conveniently cropped in.
The Number
connectpuct wins 10 of 10 games against random and 10 of 10 against the center baseline in the checked benchmark. Neither of those is a hard bar to clear, which is exactly the point: an agent that fails easy opponents has no business calling itself an agent.
4 tests pass locally and on GitHub Actions across Python 3.9, 3.11, and 3.13. The playable game lives at `web/index.html`, no excuse not to open it.