On Computerizing the Ancient Game of Ṭāb

The ancient game of ṭāb is a war and race game. It is played by two teams, each consisting of at least one player. In addition to presenting the game and its rules, the authors develop three versions of the game: human versus human, human versus computer, and computer versus computer. The authors employ a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to help the computer to choose the ‘best' move to play. The computer game is designed allowing two degrees of difficulty: Beginners and Advanced. The results of several experiments show the strategic properties of this game, the strength of the proposed method by making the computer play the game intelligently, and the potential of generalizing their approach to other similar games.