Can the Kids Beat This Simple Chinese Chess AI?

A Chinese Chess is a two player zero sum game. It is similar to Chess but have a larger board (10×9 where the middle is the river).

Long time ago, I have designed and implemented a Chinese Chess program, which was written using Delphi on Windows. The first code was written was about 2006 see this change log later I polished it a bit and migrated to a modern Delphi compiler.

And the Chess AI is based on pattern search aka the Alpha Beta Pruning. I believe, a better approach could be to use the Machine Learning (Neural Networks AI) e.g. ChatGPT-4.

Anyway, my kids love to play Chinese Chess with me, but they are slow in thinking, and it took us quite some time in order to finish a game (usually longer than 1 hour) as they spent time thinking and thinking.

So, this just came to me, why not let them play vs the AI that I created? If they are confident in beating them, then I am more than happy to take their challenges.