Masem makes an excellent point. If you are going to have a lot of board related functions, it makes a lot of sense to have those functions be methods of a board object.

Your AI particularly should be able to make a move based on the board's layout. So you can just give the AI routines the current board object. Any information the AI needs can be retrieved using $board->is_free( x, y ) or whatever methods you'd need.

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