# Strongly Solving 7 × 6 Connect-Four on Consumer Grade Hardware

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05267/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 0 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

## Abstract (arXiv)

While the game Connect-Four has been solved mathematically and the best move can be effectively computed with search based methods, a strong solution in the form of a look-up table was believed to be infeasible. In this paper, we revisit a symbolic search method based on binary decision diagrams to produce strong solutions. With our efficient implementation we were able to produce a 89.6 GB large look-up table in 47 hours on a single CPU core with 128 GB main memory for the standard 7 × 6 board size. In addition to this win-draw-loss evaluation, we include an alpha-beta search in our open source artifact to find the move which achieves the fastest win or slowest loss.