Nova is a UC Berkeley research project primarily built for efficiently searching extensive-form games, such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect4, and Chess (if it weren't so darn big). In particular, the prupose of this project is to take learnings and ambitions from Prof. Dan Garcia's multi-decade project GamesmanClassic and provide a software system that is more general, performant, and ergonomic.
Before doing anything, you will want to install the Rust compiler and toolchain. GamesmanNova is on crates.io, so to get the nova executable, you can then run:
cargo install gamesman-nova
Otherwise, if you would like to build Nova from source, you can also:
- Clone this repository to your preferred
location.
git clone https://github.com/GamesCrafters/GamesmanNova.git location
- Go to your installation (
cd location), and install the executable:
cargo install --path .
This will add the nova executable to your list of cargo binaries.
Once you have the nova executable in a directory that is part of your PATH, you can run:
nova --help
This will display a list of sub-commands and their descriptions. Nova uses clap for Unix-like command-line argument parsing.
As a research project, the primary users of Nova will be people who intend to build on it as a platform. In the long-term, we wish to make this evident by splitting Nova into multiple modular crates that better express this, in a way that makes the project more accessible.
For now, we make our best attempt at providing a good experience when building from this repository via rustdocs and a reasonable architecture. The project adheres to semantic versioning per Rust's standards, and is currently unstable.
-- Cheers, Max Fierro