The object of the game of hex is to connect your sides of a rhombus. As I got too carried away with the graphics on my geometry wars-like game, I decided to post this example that clearly and simply illustrates:

- using opengl shaders for all lighting effects
- fully functional camera, move with tyfghn, and rotate with uiojkl
- fully functional hex game suitable from human and computer play
- Monte Carlo method for weak computer play; no knowledge is implemented
- red-black trees for transposition table in computer ai
- how to detect when either player has connected their sides using simd instructions

to play a white/black stone, click the left/right mouse button
to remove a stone, click it
side with a win will flash

One thing that could make this game more interesting would be an option to play against the computer. Now, as I understood, it is a version for two human players.

Another thing that could be improved is automatic update of the view when the application window is changing its size - when you drag the window border in one direction (inwards) and after that you immediately start to drag it in the opposite direction (outwards) keeping the left mouse button pressed all the time you may see such an image:

OK, the window size thing is easy to change, but writing some (decent) ai is not a piece of cake. Hex is also hard. If we are to keep things simple, I could try a Monte Carlo tree search, but I bet it will produce close to random play in the beginning.

I agree that the game tree may be huge in size like a chess game tree. It may grow expotentially as the number of fields grows. BTW, is the hex game board somehow strictly "normalized" in size?

What do you mean by 'normalized in size'?
I can say that if the board is NxN in size then each row needs 2(N+1) bits, so 15 is the largest size if each row is to fit in a dword.

I meant whether the hex game has a constant number of fields on the board (like chess for example) or it's just a question of an arbitrary choice of the game creator.

I read in Wikipedia that the hex game can be played on boards with various numbers of fields, so the game isn't "normalized" in the aforementioned meaning.

oh, I finally get what you mean by 'fields'. You can play it on a board of any size MxN. 15x15 should be interesting for both computers and humans. If the starting position is empty,
if M != N, shorter color has a winning stategy
if M = N or the position is symmetric, first color has a winning strategy

I got some ai working in the hex game now. The two levels are '(1)random' and '(2)monte carlo'. Level 2 does sometimes produce good moves and can consistently beat Level 1.