>> Othello is now solved, computationally proved that perfect play by both players lead to a draw.
Did not see that coming. That just makes the game more interesting I think.
Othello Is Solved?
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Re: Othello Is Solved?
#12For those interested in the game (it's popular among computer science and AI scholars), the Othello world championship is currently underway in Rome, Italy with games live streamed on liveothello.com and Youtube @WorldOthello
Does this paper render the championship moot? Is any software based on the paper entered? Is Othello like checkers, where there were mostly draws in high level games?
> Is Othello like checkers, where there were mostly draws in high level games?
Othello tends to have huge score swings in the end game. I think it’s even hard to get a draw from a typical mid game position if both players were to aim for it.
This result may change that, of course.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#13Othello is one of those games that works really well for playing with young kids. The rules are simple. There’s patterning to learn. It’s fun to cause massive flips. And best of all, it’s just as fun for the adult as it is the kid. I’ve found that I can really enjoy myself without crushing my 6yo or it feeling like it’s just a luck-based game.
I also like Blokus for similar reasons.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this paper render the championship moot? Is any software based on the paper entered? Is Othello like checkers, where there were mostly draws in high level games?
Why would it render human games moot? Why would a software participate in a championship? The draw percentage in checkers/draught and in chess are roughly similar, (anywhere between 50% and 60% at high-level play), despite checkers being solved and chess not.
They are moot because the solution is known. When a human makes a mistake the intrigue is discovering the fix to become better. In solo copetition solved games are highly fascinating because the person is racing the TAS or the solved route. In human versus human games, we can simply look up what the human did wrong. There is no cognitive challenge in answer lookup. Its just oh, he sucks he missed the move. Since its two humans competing it becomes "who sucks less" but its two losers that both suck competing. Thats the problem with competitive play of solved games, it must be solo competition against the solution.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#15Is this legit? It seems weird to me that this paper has one author, from a deep-learning startup which I've never heard of before.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#16For those interested in the game (it's popular among computer science and AI scholars), the Othello world championship is currently underway in Rome, Italy with games live streamed on liveothello.com and Youtube @WorldOthello
Does this paper render the championship moot? Is any software based on the paper entered? Is Othello like checkers, where there were mostly draws in high level games?
This paper "weakly solves" Othello. That means that we know for the initial board state both 1) the final win/lose/draw outcome (it's a draw), and 2) the sequence of moves that should be taken by perfect players to get there (Figure 1, right).
In particular, the paper does not "strongly solve" Othello. If you have an arbitrary board state, 1) and 2) are are not necessarily known for it. That means it's still possible to win a game by intentionally deviating from the perfect sequence and betting on the fact that your opponent doesn't know how to recover.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#17Does that mean there are no disadvantages going second?
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#18For those interested in the game (it's popular among computer science and AI scholars), the Othello world championship is currently underway in Rome, Italy with games live streamed on liveothello.com and Youtube @WorldOthello
Does this paper render the championship moot? Is any software based on the paper entered? Is Othello like checkers, where there were mostly draws in high level games?
Probably
See: Le Sedol [1] after AlphaGo:
"On 19 November 2019, Lee announced his retirement from professional play, stating that he could never be the top overall player of Go due to the increasing dominance of AI. Lee referred to them as being "an entity that cannot be defeated""
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#19There is a lot of good background on Othello like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Othello
And especially: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-07/page/n57/m...
That Byte article is about implementing practical heuristics to create a human like player as opposed to completely exhaustive play which was most definitely impossible on early 80s machines.
I happened to implement a version myself at https://luduxia.com/reversi/
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#20How about the ancient Chinese game of "go", next? Not convinced that can easily be solved at all.
Among popular board games, Go is more computationally complex than chess, so the latter would probably be solved first.