Zillions of Games - Limitations

Limitations

Despite its versatility, Zillions of Games has a number of non-trivial limitations:

• Zillions Of Games is designed to play perfect information games exclusively. This renders it of little or no use in fairly playing imperfect or hidden information games against the AI, such as card games or board games with hidden piece values like Stratego. Instead, the program will automatically use all information available to itself, including the cards in the deck and the cards in the hands of all other players. The games may still be played by human players, although there is no support for revealing information selectively to only one player.
• Its programming language lacks support for arithmetic, for functions, and for variables beyond some boolean flags.
• The engine does not have built-in support for connection-based goals such as in Hex; thus these goals must be implemented by hand.
• There is also no support for having multiple pieces per location, or for pieces covering multiple locations at once. Thus, complicated workarounds are required for games that need these features, such as Mancala, Laska or Quoridor.
• Like most AI game playing programs, the default engine plays poorly in games with large branching factors, such as shogi.
• In some vital respects, the program is too restrictive in what it allows.
  • Although it can recognize repetition, the only kind it can recognize is threefold repetition.
  • Although it can check for various win, loss and draw conditions at the end of a move, it cannot check for any of them when evaluating possible moves for a piece. Consequently, in shogi, for example, it cannot be programmed to always accurately enforce the rule against checkmating a King with a Pawn drop.
  • Many multi-person chess variants cannot be played because it will immediately stop the game when the first player is checkmated or stalemated.
• In some cases, the quality of gameplay is compromised due to the AI automatically calculating piece values inaccurately with no option available for manually overriding it with accurate piece values.