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Strategy, updates, and deep dives.

Engineering · 09

The First-Player Tax

In self-mirror matches between identical Elite copies, Player 1 wins 96.8% of 7x7 games. One extra move on odd boards turns tempo into a near-lock — and sometimes flips match outcomes 100-to-0.

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Engineering · 08

Tournament Heatmaps: Is the Difficulty Ladder Graduated?

Labeling a tier "Hard" is free. Proving it beats "Medium" is not. Every time we change an AI, we run 9,000 games across every tier and board size — the two heatmaps that come out are how we know the difficulty ladder actually holds together.

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Engineering · 07

How Elite Plays: The AI Inside Cell Division

Elite isn't a cloud call, a scripted sequence, or a random chance. It's a tiny neural network trained to imitate a much stronger AlphaZero-style teacher — and it runs entirely on your phone.

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Engineering · 06

The AlphaZero Detour

We spent three weeks building a full AlphaZero system for Cell Division — then didn't ship it. Here's why tree search was wrong for a phone, and why the trained network still taught the Elite AI you play today.

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Origin · 05

From Connect Four to Connect One

How a decade of Checkers, Chess, Go, and Connect Four turned into Cell Division — via a knob-turning experiment that ended at connect-1 and a new scoring rule.

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Engineering · 04

Why the Hint Button Doesn't Beat Elite

The in-game hint used to have its own trained models, one per opponent. We deleted all of it. Here's why the hint now just asks Elite what to play — and why we deliberately chose not to ship a hint that could beat Elite for you.

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Strategy · 03

Claim the Interior, Starve the Edges

Why corners cap at 6, why the 1-away pivot captures territory, and how to think about Cell Division as a zero-sum margin game.

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Primer · 01

How to Play Cell Division

Place cells, build connections, outscore your opponent — a visual walkthrough of the rules, scoring, and AI tiers.

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Primer · 02

Meet Your Four Opponents

Cell Division has four AI opponents — Easy, Medium, Hard, and Elite. They're genuinely different from each other, not the same bot with more handicap. Here's what each one is doing and which tier to play.

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