Used to play an Othello game on my phone many moons ago. I always won by always going inside-out.
Othello Is Solved?
71–80 of 285 posts
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#72Correct 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.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the superconductor “debacle”. What you're preaching is not skepticism, but cynicism.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that Othello is solved, there exist a set of rules a player can follow to guarantee a win or draw every game. It's possible (if unlikely) that a computer could sufficiently compress those rules to be memorizable (and then applicable) by a human.
Checkers have been solved 16 years ago and still see competition. A game being solved is not exactly the same as "apply this memorizable algorithm and you'll win", especially if the solution implies scanning 10^n positions for each move.
In case you wondering like me, checkers here means American checkers, played on a smaller 8x8 board. International checkers played on 10x10 board is a much bigger space to explore of course.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> a mathematical puzzle that is mostly trivia "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…
It's not obvious to me that othello is much more complicated than checkers. Admittedly, I haven't played since I was a kid and I don't completely remember what the rules are.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Weakly solving" a game is a technical term. If you have weakly solved a game, you can play perfectly (achieve the optimal result) when the game starts from its initial position. If you have strongly solved it, you can play perfectly starting from any position.
Sorry, I was unclear: I know what weakly solved means. What I find curious is that the title and abstract refer to "solved", and don't mention what they actually mean. To me "solved" would suggest "strongly solved". But perhaps equating "solved" with "weakly solved" is default in this area? Still, I would like expect an abstract to say something like that explicitly. But given the overall state of that paper I think…
They wrote about this in the introduction and in the context of algorithm 2.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#76Correct 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.
I thought the post is #1 on HN because people here are genuinely interested in the topic and would like to at least examine the paper and discuss the merits of it.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#77no, 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...
And if you played against yourself, did you still win?
Plot twist: GP is the author of the paper, and your question is how they demonstrated that "both players playing perfectly leads to a draw".
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#78Correct 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.
I was watching every development of that superconductivity claim. I was quite enthused! But never once did I move beyond "groundbreaking if true." This doesn't even have the potential to be groundbreaking. Get over yourself, let people get excited about little stuff.
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#79Othello 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…
I read an article many years ago on programing Othello. I think it was BYTE Magazine, circa early 1980s. It mentioned pitting an app using a simple heuristic technique similar to the one you describe against an app using an equally simple (but devastatingly horrible) "flip the most squares" approach.
The heuristic algorithm won by a landslide -- 60 to 4 or worse (I don't remember exactly).
Re: Othello Is Solved?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a mathematical puzzle that is mostly trivia "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…
It's not obvious to me that othello is much more complicated than checkers. Admittedly, I haven't played since I was a kid and I don't completely remember what the rules are.
So you don't really know much about the computational complexity of the game and you're saying it's trivial.
How hard a game is to "solve" at least using traditional algorithmic techniques is related to its search space. That is a combination of the length of the game and the number of possible moves in each position (ply and branching factor). Chess has more possible positions than exist atoms in the universe by some estimates. Checkers has a tractable, for modern supercomputers, 500 billion possible positions with about a ~6 branching factor over an average of ~50 ply games.
Othello is several orders of magnitude more complex than checkers but not quite at the level of chess. So, this is a big claim. It's by no means trivial.