Playing Connect Four against a robot at WIAI's anniversary celebration

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Faculty of Information Systems and Applied Computer Sciences on June 26, 2026, the Multimodal Intelligent Interaction group presented a demo in which visitors could play Connect Four against a robot. Games were played on a physical board, with a robot arm placing its pieces.

Matthias Schmidt from the MII team had implemented a playing strategy that considers possible sequences of moves and responses from the human opponent. The playing strength could be adjusted by changing how many moves the software looked ahead. The higher difficulty settings proved challenging for visitors. He ran the demonstration together with Prof. Dr. Markus Rickert.

Participants could take home small 3D-printed robot dogs. Some children returned for another game to collect the different colors.

Retrospective on the anniversary celebration