Boruzen is a variation of Gale's game. I read about this game in a mathematical puzzle book by Martin Gardner in 1980's. I have lost the book long ago.

 I had made a number of attempts in the past to write this game.

 The first attempt was in 1980's when I first learned programming. I programmed it with Pascal. The solution was based on modeling the board as an electric circuit and calculating the currents in all connections. It required building Kirchhoff's circuit laws. The project failed.

 The second attempt was in 1990. I had written a program in C which roughly simulates the distribution of electric currents. It was good enough this time. Computer played nicely although it failed to find the best winning moves, it was a good opponent and fun to play with.

 This is the third attempt. After deciding to take up iPhone programming as a hobby, I looked for a subject and this old friend looked like a good candidate. The algorithm uses the classical programming techniques. It uses a recursive algorithm that searches all possible paths.

 In Boruzen, the first player always has an advantage and unless a mistake is made, the first player should always win. However building a strategy is fairly difficult for larger board sizes and beating the iPhone gets more and more difficult.

Version Information

V1.0 - Release Date - December 2009

Known bugs : 

* When you resume a game application crashes after the first move. You need to quit that game using Home button and start a new game. This will be corrected in the next release.