61–70 of 285 posts
Othello 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.
no, Othello is not complex, I do not remember exactly how but i did play a lot when i was you and did find a way to win consistently...
After a while, that got dull so I wrote a little program that would randomly POKE into the game's memory space. The usual result was a crash, or a program that didn't know how to play, or would only put pieces on the lines instead of the empty cells, that kind of thing. Every so often, though ... it would just play a little differently against me. No crashes, no weirdness. I always wondered what exactly had gone on with my random mutation there: was there some table of position evaluations whose weightings I had tweaked? A rule jumped over in the code?
Correct title: an unknown author from an unknown startup claims in an arXiv preprint (listed somehow in the cs.AI archive) that Othello has been solved. The paper is 13 pages long. I wish that the superconductor debacle (and many others) had taught people critical thinking and skepticism. And yet this is the #1 post on HN right now.
Trust but verify. People were excited, but pretty much the first thing on everyone's mind was looking for replication. In contrast, this is not spouting a revolution in physics, but a mathematical puzzle that is mostly trivia. I suspect that the best computer Othello algorithm can already trounce a human.
"Solving" a game is not "trivia" or a "puzzle". It's an actual mathematical problem that requires nontrivial proofs for nontrivial games. Think about it: a game as "simple" as checkers was only solved in 2007.
> I suspect that the best computer Othello algorithm can already trounce a human.
That's a completely different problem. Chess computers are much, much better than humans, but chess is far from being solved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That means it's still possible to win a game by intentionally deviating from the perfect sequence Someone with perfect strategy would have an answer for any deviation. Playing imperfectly would likely get you into a losing position. There is no way to go from a game being drawn if played perfectly to being winning if the then loser were to be using perfect strategy.
No, the paper only "weakly solves", so it doesn't give a perfect strategy of the type you talk about. Imagine finding a pamphlet written by God that contains a listing of a perfect game of chess. Armed with it, you will still lose easily to Magnus Carlsen. He will deviate fro| the sequence and you won't know the perfect responses to his moves.
How would you go to prove that this is the perfect game of chess, if you didn't explore all of it's possible sequences? If they did solve the game, there's no way around knowing all possible outcomes - starting from a fixed given position.
Does that mean there are no disadvantages going second?
Correct title: an unknown author from an unknown startup claims in an arXiv preprint (listed somehow in the cs.AI archive) that Othello has been solved. The paper is 13 pages long. I wish that the superconductor debacle (and many others) had taught people critical thinking and skepticism. And yet this is the #1 post on HN right now.
Doesn't it make sense to give some visibility to such claims so they can be verified? I would think a lot of people on HN are equipped to take part in this informally.
But I agree with you that the title is too categorical and should be updated.
Correct title: an unknown author from an unknown startup claims in an arXiv preprint (listed somehow in the cs.AI archive) that Othello has been solved. The paper is 13 pages long. I wish that the superconductor debacle (and many others) had taught people critical thinking and skepticism. And yet this is the #1 post on HN right now.
Othello is a great game to demonstrate how powerful some basic heuristics can be. There are certain squares that you should avoid placing pebble on as the game develops - equally there are squares that you should definitely try and place a pebble on if you can. Implementing these rules can give you a fairly decent opponent and it's interesting to see how quickly people will ascribe "intelligence" to something that is…
Correct title: an unknown author from an unknown startup claims in an arXiv preprint (listed somehow in the cs.AI archive) that Othello has been solved. The paper is 13 pages long. I wish that the superconductor debacle (and many others) had taught people critical thinking and skepticism. And yet this is the #1 post on HN right now.