Connect Four, played by a GF(256) integer model A small network whose trunk does XOR and table lookups instead of float multiply-accumulates — and an honest measurement of how good it actually is.

Christof Ckal · code · model · direct link

If the board does not load, open the game directly at c4.tensorgarten.de.

The honest numbers

Teacher agreement (holdout)41.0 %

vs. random player85.2 %

vs. 1-ply heuristic37.2 %

vs. 2-ply lookahead24.3 %

vs. minimax41.8 %

600 games per arm. It beats random and still loses to a three-line heuristic — that gap is the point of the project.

The game is a session-scoped server on CPU: every visitor gets an opaque HttpOnly cookie and their own board. Nothing is shared between visitors.

Security headers are set by the app itself, and the public deployment is checked by a script that runs against the deployed process over HTTPS.