6. Connect-Four is a game that might be viewed as an extension or more sophisticated version of tic-tac-toe. That is, the objective is to get four disks of one color in a straight line (row,

column, or diagonal) as disks are added to a grid of seven columns and six rows. The game was solved independently by James D. Allen and Victor Allis in 1988.56

a. If you were to try to develop a program to play this game, how would you do it?

b. How would you go about solving the game? What AI methods might you use to reduce the amount of searching that would be necessary? What problem constraints and symmetries could be exploited to reduce the problem size?