An improved FPGA-based specific processor for Blokus Duo

Abstract

This article presents a hardware design of a specific processor for Blokus Duo game. This design is an evolution of our previous work presented in the ICFPT'13 Design Competition. In order to improve its performance we have designed parallel hardware blocks to speed up the most time-consuming tasks, and included additional techniques to reduce the search space. As a consequence we can process a board six times faster than in our previous version and we prune the game-tree much more efficiently.