Sillysoft Games

Hi everyone! I want to ask a couple of questions about AI of RISK. First of all i am very new on AI topic and have been studying it for a few months and i want to implement RISK game. Well i have an idea about minimax, expectimax algorithms for implementing a decision tree and i'm sure that i have to use expectimax algorithm. However, i'm unsure about should i use A* algorithm for finding closest path from a territory to another ? or is it mandatory ?. I am asking cause there is a very useful document written by

Wolf Michael - "An Intelligent Artificial Player for the Game of Risk

and it says

It also offers a method that utilises an A*-Search [Russell and Norvig, 1995] to compute the attack path with the highest victory probability given a start territory and a destination territory.

. I have a some opinions but didnt consider to use A*. So if you can help or share your opinions i will be very appreciated.

A* is definitely a useful algorithm to use.

You should check out the Sillysoft SDK, which also has source code for a number of AIs, and helper functions for path-findings as well:
http://sillysoft.net/sdk/

thanks dustin. i was just curious about that if A* is used for pathfing in ai. well i guess i have to spend time on trying to understand the mechanism of lux agents.