Connect 4 Engine

This project implements a super fast Connect 4 engine in C, written during my undergraduate studies.

The bot is based on classical game tree search techniques:

• Negamax search with a score convention that favors winning in fewer moves.
• Optimized win checking around the last move rather than scanning the whole board.
• Alpha-beta style pruning via a narrow (null) search window [α, α+1] to quickly discard inferior moves.
• Iterative deepening over score bounds progressively tightening the search interval.
• Column ordering that explores central columns first (where winning chances are higher), improving pruning efficiency.

In practice, the engine plays very strongly and consistently beats online Connect-Four bots on hard difficulty, while remaining fast and responsive in a terminal UI.

Project link: https://github.com/zeinshehab/Connect-Four

• Algorithms
• Game AI
• Negamax
• Alpha-Beta
• Iterative Deepening
• C
• Artificial Intelligence