Way way back (think 20+ years) I encountered a Gomoku game source code in a magazine that I typed in for my computer and had a lot of fun with.

The game was difficult to win against, but the core algorithm for the computer AI was really simply and didn't account for a lot of code. I wonder if anyone knows this algorithm and has some links to some source or theory about it.

The things I remember was that it basically allocated an array that covered the entire board. Then, whenever I, or it, placed a piece, it would add a number of weights to all locations on the board that the piece would possibly impact.

For instance (note that the weights are definitely wrong as I don't remember those):

1   1   1
 2  2  2
  3 3 3
   444
1234X4321
  3 3 3
 2  2  2
1   1   1

Then it simply scanned the array for an open location with the lowest or highest value.

Things I'm fuzzy on:

• Perhaps it had two arrays, one for me and one for itself and there was a min/max weighting?
• There might've been more to the algorithm, but at its core it was basically an array and weighted numbers

Does this ring a bell with anyone at all? Anyone got anything that would help?