Implementation of Sprouts: A Graph Drawing Game

Tomás Cízek, Martin Balko

Abstract: Sprouts is a two-player pencil-and-paper game invented by John Conway and Michael Paterson in 1967. In the game, the players take turns in joining dots by curves according to simple rules, until one player cannot make a move. The game of Sprouts is very popular and simple-looking, so it may come as a surprise that there are essentially no AI Sprouts players available. This lack of computer opponents is caused by the fact that the game hides a surprisingly high combinatorial complexity and implementing it involves fascinating programming challenges.