Abstract
Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) is a popular strategic board game that is well suited to the minimax algorithm. Trappy minimax is a version of minimax that has been shown to have better performance against human players than regular minimax in the games Checkers and Othello. Therefore, it is interesting to apply trappy minimax to Xiangqi, because Xiangqi is more complex and popular than Checkers and Othello. This project utilizes an open source Xiangqi program originally created by Pham Hong Nguyen. The Move class and the Evaluation function have been modified, and the trappy minimax algorithm has been added, using Visual Studio .Net. It is a stand-alone Windows application that utilizes iterative deepening to do a 5-ply search, while setting traps. The Xiangqi program with regular minimax beats the Xiangqi program with trappy minimax, but the Xiangqi program with trappy minimax has better performance against human players than the Xiangqi program with regular minimax. The results are consistent with previous results for Checkers and Othello.