Ricochet Robots is a puzzle board game for any number of players. While being a very fun game to play with some fascinating properties, it is also interesting to think about writing a program to play the game.

Let’s discuss a computerized player for Ricochet Robots that finds the optimal solution to any board in a reasonable amount of time. Along the way, we’ll learn about graph search techniques, data representation, algorithms, heuristics, pruning, and optimization.

The slides for this talk are available on SpeakerDeck.