Lonely humans – or cheaters who can’t get anyone to play board games with them anymore – have a new friend in the making. French researcher Łukasz Kaiser has developed computer software that teaches the rules of board games to a computer so that it can then play and defeat humans. Kaiser’s method involves taking videos of five different board games being played by humans: Breakthrough, Connect Four, Gomoku, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Pawn Whopping.

The software looks at only the game tokens, not at the human hands playing the games, and it is told whether each token position is winning, losing or illegal. With only this basic information, the system is able to figure out the rules of each game with a great deal of accuracy. Once the system knows the rules, it can play against humans – and it usually wins. Of course, the rules of these games are pretty simple, but Kaiser plans to keep improving the rule-learning algorithm so that the system can eventually learn more complicated games like chess.

The post Computer Learns Rules of Games, Then Beats You at Them first appeared on Gajitz.

It’s no secret that anything Tron can make our nerdy senses light up and put a grin on every geek’s face. But this particular Tron project is so awesome it is almost beyond words. Make forum member Brett King built a one-of-a-kind Tron board game to play with his kids. You might not think that a game about lightcycles would make any sense, but it totally does if you are at all familiar with the Tron movies.

King bought die-cast lightcycles and a Recognizer, then set out to build the game board and pieces. The board is laser-etched acrylic painted with special black-light paint. The lightcycle trails are differently colored cut acrylic. The whole thing is mounted on a spinning base to make the game board easy for everyone to reach.

From there, the game goes pretty much like you would expect: you try to get your opponent to crash into your trail. Since this is a homemade game with no pre-existing rules, King and his kids are still figuring out exactly how to make all of that happen. But sadly, the Game Creator has no plans to sell his invention – so unless you want to build your own, he and his lucky, lucky kids are the only people who will ever get to play with this masterpiece of geekdom.

The post Get Ready for a Geekasm: DIY TRON Lightcycle Board Game first appeared on Gajitz.

We have to admit a very soft spot for Tetris – it’s a classic game that we grew up playing for hours and hours on end. We’re still playing it today, in fact. But just in case you ever get tired of staring at a screen, a company called Techno Source is taking the colorful shapes and bringing them into the physical world.

Tetris Link is a soon-to-be-released game that reworks everyone’s favorite block-arranging game into a Connect Four-type game complete with vertical plastic game board.

Rather than filling up entire lines to get rid of blocks, the goal of this game is to connect as many of your specific color (red, blue, yellow or green) while blocking other players’ color connections. Every player rolls the dice to determine which piece they can play on their turn.

Apparently Tetris has been remade in every possible way in the digital realm and is now set to take over the physical game world as well. With so many of our classic childhood favorite games making their way into digital formats, maybe it only makes sense that this perennial favorite of the video game world is now being remade as a tabletop game. Can’t wait to play? The game will be available for around $20 starting in the Spring of 2011.

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Long before the internet, families and friends participated in an interesting arcane ritual: playing board games. There was no LAN, there were no wi-fi connected devices; there was simply a board, some little pieces, and in the case of these retro electronic games, a few blinking lights and tinny noises. Believe it or not, these board games used to be kind of high-tech.

As if playing at a table in a dimly-lit basement wasn’t nerdy enough, this version of Dungeons and Dragons features a touch-sensitive electronic board. The Dungeons and Dragons Computer Labyrinth game involved, unsurprisingly, a dungeon in which a dragon lived. The game’s electronic brain randomly placed “walls” on the game board which players had to find by stumbling around. One misstep, though, and players would find themselves face-to-face with the nasty dragon.

Dream Phone is a great example of a game that worked well 20 years ago but probably wouldn’t be as appealing today. The game consisted of trying to figure out which boy had a crush on you by “calling” various other boys on a plastic phone. Questionable semi-misogynistic theme aside (girls didn’t decide who to like – the boy made that decision), the game play was boring, the boys were weird-looking, and the phone contraption was annoying. Today we just give 9-year-old girls their own working cell phones and let them play their own real-life version of Dream Phone.

Electronic Detective is kind of like Clue, but with records. Released in 1979, the “computerized” game is a classic mystery where players race against each other to figure out who perpetrated a crime. Players question suspects who provide their answers via a little red LCD screen. The game might look kind of bulky and clumsy by today’s standards, but it was all the rage among young adults in the late 70s/early 80s.

The post Board to Death: 3 Retro Pre-Internet Electronic Games first appeared on Gajitz.