I am now reaching the end of my GSoC period. Contributing to KDE has been a great learning experience, one that I intend to continue beyond this project.
Throughout this summer, I’ve developed a C++ library called MankalaEngine, implementing three opponents for the games of Bohnenspiel and Oware.
The current library is highly extensible. After implementing all the base classes and Bohnenspiel, adding Oware to the library was fairly fast and straightforward. This focus on extensibility has been a priority since the beginning of the project. Given that the Mancala family of games comprises numerous variants, designing the API with this in mind has proven valuable.
The three provided opponents use a random selection algorithm, Minimax, and MTD-f. The Minimax and MTD-f opponents were implemented with optimizations like alpha-beta pruning and transposition tables, making them both very capable, consistently outperforming the random opponent.
For a more detailed overview of what was accomplished, I wrote a work report on KDE’s wiki.
The last few months have been a very enriching experience from a technical standpoint.
Contributing to a “real-world” project allowed me to learn about technologies I hadn’t used before. For example, I learned how to use CMake and how to set up a CI pipeline.
I also faced concerns that don’t typically arise when developing a school or personal project, such as adhering to an organization’s software standards. To this end, I learned about open-source licenses and new programming idioms.
Since MankalaEngine is a completely new library, my interaction with the community was limited, as there isn’t an existing group of contributors for this particular project.
I mainly interacted with my mentors, who were very helpful. Although less frequently, I also had the opportunity to communicate with other KDE contributors through mailing lists, from whom I also learned a great deal.