Boruzen is an implementation of Gale's game (also known as Brig-It). I read about this game in a mathematical puzzle book by Martin Gardner in 1980's. The game was first published in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Recerations" column in Scientific American. (See the links at the bottom for more information about the game.)

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

 The first attempt was in 1980's when I first learned programming. I have written the first version in 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. This solution was given by Martin Gardner in his book (not in the form of a solution but as an electrical device that can play the game). The project failed for the obvious reasons. Insufficient knowledge in programming and electiric circuits.

 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 sometimes failed to find the best winning moves, it was a good opponent and fun to play with.

 This is my third attempt. After taking 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, finds the shortest path and tries to build that path. I made several tricks and improvements to be able to work with iPhone's limited resources. Still there is room for some improvement.

 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.

The original game board in Gardner's book was different. I changed it to the current layout you will see in the application. However it is only a change in the visual representation. You can see the original boards here and here.

Screen Shots

Version Information

V1.0 - Release Date - December 2009 (Initial Release)
V1.1 - Release Date - January 2010 (New Graphics & Free Version)
V1.2 - Relese Date - March 2010 (Performance Improvements)
V1.5 - Release Date - May 2010 (New graphics, improved instructions)

Known bugs : 

* There is a problem with the resume function.
* There is a memory leak that I had not been able to locate. So if you are playing the game with large board sizes, it might be a good idea to quit and restart the application beetween games.

Bridg-It in Internet

BoardGameGeek * Mark Thomson * Game of Bridg-It by Sandy Dean * Wikipedia - Shannon Switching Game