Novel hardware/software co-design approach for Connect6 game-solver

Abstract

This paper introduces an enhanced Hardware-Software Co-Design implementation of Connect6 game solver compared to a prevalent implementation by using novel data communications and enhanced tree-searching algorithms. Hardware-software communication is improved by transferring the current board position from the Processing System to the Programmable Logic through a 21-bit change board instead of the complete 722-bit board. Tree-search, to find the next best move, is enhanced by using Negascout algorithm, Iterative Deepening, Node Ordering and Memoization. The proposed design demonstrates 50 % improvement in the overall performance and 92 % in communication overhead compared to the prevalent implementation. Further, it is around 4 times faster than its software implementation on the same platform. The analysis was carried on Xilinx Zedboard SOC using the GNU GCC Compiler with the Maximum Optimisation Flag (O3) activated.