Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Othello Is Solved?

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 285 posts

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#101

Post by notfed »

anigbrowl wrote: post #70
uxp8u61q wrote: post #51

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.

Boo. The paper is cautiously written, addresses a very tractable and well-defined problem, confirms what experts expected, and is straightforward to implement (the source code is on Github). And yet this posturing is the #1 comment on this thread right now.

Great, then let's name it "Othello claimed to be solved", then pound it with peer reviews and reproductions for a bit, then we can phrase it as "Othello is solved".

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#102

Post by kelsey9876543 »

addaon wrote: post #36
kelsey9876543 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Since its two humans competing it becomes "who sucks less" but its two losers that both suck competing. Yeah, this is my problem with bowling and golf. If you're a professional bowler, literally your only job is to knock down the pins. Why do anything else? If you miss one, you're bad at your job. Ditto with golf -- the hole is right there, just get the ball in it! (Honestly not sure how sarcastic vs sincere I am i…

In bowling and golf the mistake is athletic. You moved your body wrong, also there are variables such as the wind and humidity of the air in golf, and a in bowling the ball and other micro variables effect play. It's possible to improve physical condition with training, but there is no "perfect". In a fully abstracted competitive game where all variables are eliminated except for mental choices, it becomes about memorization of the solutions if the game is solved.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#103

Post by bediger4000 »

rc_mob wrote: post #55
bediger4000 wrote: post #3

Earlier 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?

I don't understand this comment. Computers are not allowed to play in the championship.

I confess to being dumb and not understanding it's a human championship. My bad!

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#104

Post by kelsey9876543 »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #52
addaon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since its two humans competing it becomes "who sucks less" but its two losers that both suck competing. Yeah, this is my problem with bowling and golf. If you're a professional bowler, literally your only job is to knock down the pins. Why do anything else? If you miss one, you're bad at your job. Ditto with golf -- the hole is right there, just get the ball in it! (Honestly not sure how sarcastic vs sincere I am i…

Foot races are also solved - these losers should just get a car!

Cars are not allowed in the rules of the game "foot race", therefore your solution is not valid and therefore your argument has no evidence to support your claim.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#106

Post by mcphage »

scythe wrote: post #68
uxp8u61q wrote: post #51

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.

You really wouldn't want to have a post sit on top of Hacker News for an hour and nothing comes of it. Think of how much we could have gotten done on this messageboard otherwise!

Boy are you gonna feel foolish when the #2 post on HN is “Cancer almost cured”, and you realize how dangerous a diversion this was…

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#107

Post by kbenson »

WoodenChair wrote: post #80
sebzim4500 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

The person you're responding to wasn't the one that said it was "trivia" (much less trivial).

I don't think anyone was saying it's easy, just that they didn't think it was very useful to know.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#108

Post by neontomo »

bentcorner wrote: post #96
mark_l_watson wrote: post #89

This is cool. I solved a simpler game about 15 years ago that my brother and I used to play: an African game with about 10 pits on each side of the board that hold stones. I coded up an alpha-beta engine for it, and discovered crazy always win strategies to match how my brother and I played. Suddenly I would win all the games, and then he never wanted to play again. This was a classic match up of a computer scientist…

> an African game with about 10 pits on each side of the board that hold stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala if you want more info

Also, another version I'm more familiar with from childhood is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#109

Post by CyberDildonics »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #38

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…

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 very simple.

Who is actually "ascribing intelligence" to this? Othello has been on $10 LCD games that take double AA batteries.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#110

Post by coldtea »

cwillu wrote: post #72
uxp8u61q wrote: post #51

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.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the superconductor “debacle”. What you're preaching is not skepticism, but cynicism.

Given the myriad posts and articles about "huge breakthrough", "industry changing" and so on, scepticism in that case would translate to way more cynicism.
Post reply on HN