Tutorial: Using Combinatorial Game Suite

Contents

Overview

Welcome to Combinatorial Game Suite!  This tutorial describes the main features of CGSuite and contains numerous examples and exercises.

The most fundamental part of Combinatorial Game Suite is the Worksheet, where you can type commands and perform calculations directly.  If you're new to CGSuite, you should start with the Worksheet Basics section.

The Explorer provides a graphical editor for positions in various games (such as Amazons and Domineering).  It also allows you to browse the game tree and search for good moves.  The Using the Explorer section describes it in more detail.

As of version 0.4, Combinatorial Game Suite permits recursive definitions of functions - for example, to specify the value of a game in terms of the values of previous positions.  That feature is documented extensively in a separate section of this tutorial, Functions and Lists.

A variety of scripting commands are also supported, such as if/then/else statements and for loops.  Scripts in Combinatorial Game Suite are very similar to Maple programs; see the Writing Scripts section for more details.

A newly added tutorial segment discusses CGSuite's support for Loopy Games.

Included with this tutorial is a comprehensive list of all Methods and Keywords available in CGSuite.

Finally, cgsuite incorporates an extensive plug-in system that can be used to add third-party support for new games.  Plug-ins are discussed in a separate tutorial, How to Write a Plug-in.


Continue on to Worksheet Basics