Awale Game: Application Programming Interface and Augmented Reality Interface

Awale Game: Application Programming

Interface and Augmented Reality Interface

Marie-Parisius Dorian Houessou(1;2), Vinasetan Ratheil Houndji(1;2), Eugene

C. Ezin(1), Manhougbe Probus A. F. Kiki(2;3), Harold Silvere Kiossou(2;3),

Jean-Baptiste Maureen Sossou(2;3), Faizath Jedida Zoumarou Walis(2;3)

(1) Institut de Formation et de Recherche en Informatique (IFRI, UAC, Benin)

(2) Machine Intelligence For You SARL

(3) Ecole Polytechnique dAbomey-Calavi (EPAC, UAC, Benin)

Abstract. Awale game is one of the famous board games from

Africa with many variants and is now played worldwide in various

forms. In this paper, we propose an open-source Application Pro-

gramming Interface (API) for developers to allow an easy implemen-

tation of the various variants of Awale as well as articial intelligence

based players. The API is available online at https://github.com/

Machine-Intelligence-For-You/Awale. Based on this API, we propose

a PC Awale game, a mobile Awale game, and an Augmented Reality

Game. The Awale API, PC game, and mobile game are implemented in

the programming language Java while the game in Augmented Reality

is realized with the C# programming language, Unity 3D game engine

and the Vuforia Augmented Reality SDK. The various tests carried out

show that the API and the dierent games are totally functional. This

API was also used for the rst edition of MAIC, an Articial Intelligence

contest https://mify-ai.com/maic2017/.

Keywords: Awale, API, Augmented Reality, Articial Intelligence, Board game

1 Introduction

It is well known that games are an integral part of the human life. Among

the board and society games, Awale is one of the most famous African games.

It has several playable versions on electronic terminals. Awale itself exists in

several forms (Mancala, Oware, Ayo, Wari, etc.) according to specic ethnic

groups in which it is found. The existence of its dierent variants makes hard

the implementation of this game and causes a variation of the implementation

of an Articial Intelligence (AI) for each of them. However, to the best of our

knowledge, there is no generic API Awale Game to ease the implementation of

the dierent variants of the game. Here we develop an API to ease this game

implementation such that it would be possible to create various kinds of Awale

games, which can use the latest technologies such as Augmented Reality. This

paper proposes an open-source Application Programming Interface (API) for

developers to allow an easy implementation of the various variants of Awale as

well as articial intelligence based players. Our goal is to make available to the

scientic community a set of functionalities to easily implement software agents

for the Awale game. The API is very generic and allows the modication of

several values such as the game board's size, the number of holes, the number

of seeds per hole when starting the game, the time of play per player, and the

game's direction. To ensure that the API is functional, we develop (based on it):

{ a graphical PC Awale game;

{ a mobile Awale game;

{ an Augmented Reality (AR) based on the mobile Awale game.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a background of Awale

game, API and AR technology; Section 3 describes the dierent tools used; Section

4 presents the class diagram; Section 5 shows some graphical interfaces obtained;

and Section 6 concludes.

2 Background

Awale game is a board game from Africa. It seems to come exactly from Ethiopia

and spread to the whole African continent [7]. It's a "count and capture" type

game in which you distribute seeds in holes. Awale game requires abilities such

as re

ection, decision and strategy that ranks it at the same level as chess. A

classical Awale game is played using a board containing two rows of six holes.

In some variants of the game, one can nd two bigger holes on the edges. The

seeds played in this game usually come from the tree "Caesalpinia bonduc" and

are called in the Fongbe language "Adjikouin". They can however, be replaced

by balls or pebbles and must be forty-eight for a classic Awale. Games are

played according to well-dened rules. Many video games exist today on several

terminals in the Awale Game especially on smartphones and are available on the

dierent mobile apps downloading platforms like PlayStore or AppStore. Below

we dene API and AR which are the two main contributions about Awale game

in this paper.

API stands for Application Programming Interface and is a set of routines,

...