From C to Blokus Duo with LegUp high-level synthesis

We apply high-level synthesis (HLS) to generate Blokus Duo game-playing hardware for the FPT 2013 Design Competition [3]. Our design, written in C, is synthesized using the LegUp open-source HLS tool to Verilog, then subsequently mapped using vendor tools to an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA on DE2 board. Our software implementation is designed to be amenable to high-level synthesis, and includes a custom stack implementation, uses only integer arithmetic, and employs the use of bitwise logical operations to improve overall computational performance. The underlying AI decision making is based on alpha-beta pruning [2]. The performance of our synthesizable solution is gauged by playing against the Pentobi [8] - a “known good” C++ software implementation.