CONNECT6
The main stream of the current Connect6 development started from the presentation by Professor I-Chen Wu. Since the game rules are simple, it is believed that several have thought of the rules earlier. For example, one claims: the idea of the game (Chinese name "六子棋") emerged on the internet around 1999 first on the Chinese popular BBS site bbs.tsinghua.edu.cn and subsequently on the popular overseas Chinese BBS site bbs.mit.edu (now www.mitbbs.com).
However, no Connect6 game records existed or were discussed before Prof. Wu introduced the game Connect6. The history from Prof. Wu is as follows. One day in the summer of 2003, Prof. Wu came up with this game when playing with his daughter. He started considering the potential of the game to be popular, and began to investigate it. To be popular, he reasoned, his game must be fair and complex, so his first plan was to have a computer program play the game to see how fair and complex it is.
In spring 2004, a master student of Prof. Wu, Dei-Yen Huang, joined Wu's project as his master thesis. In the first quarter of 2005, they completed the first Connect6 AI program, which already can beat most players. Then Wu's team allowed his AI program to play itself.
In 2005, Wu's team wrote a paper, presented in the 11th Advances in Computer Games Conference (ACG11), held in Taipei, Taiwan, 2005.
In September 2005, ThinkNewIdea Limited built the first Connect6 game server.
On September 20–September 21, 2005, the game was covered by many news media in Taiwan.
The program NCTU6, rewritten by Professor Wu, won gold in the Connect6 tournament at the 11th Computer Olympiad.