Written: Feb. 1, 2008.
Now that even my youngest daughter, Hadas, who is now seventeen, finds the game too stupid, I had to teach my beloved servant, Shalosh B. Ekhad, how to play, and it, for one, will never lose interest. I first taught it the rules, but it is so fast, that very very soon it surpassed its master.
This is a metaphor for computer-generated mathematics. Everything is Mathematics! In my eyes Connect-Four is much deeper than, say, K-theory. Of course, K-theory is deeper than the Win-In-One-Move problems, and perhaps even than the Win-In-Three-Moves problems, but definitely not deeper than the Win-In-Five-Moves problems in this book.
You can create many more nifty problems, on your own. Try out procedure MakeGoodProbs1 (or MakeGoodProbs2) in the Maple Package. You can also change the size of the board, and play "Connect-Three" or "Connect Five", etc., by redefining, at the beginning, the values of the (global variables) M,N,K.
In order to use the Maple package ConnectFour, just download it, and follow the on-line instructions. Have fun! Of course, you need to have the computer algebra system Maple on your computer.
Thanks Celia, Tamar, and Hadas for the many hours of Playing Connect-Four with me!