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Othello Is Solved?

arxiv.org

161–170 of 285 posts

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#161
post #130

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…

I did something similar for my (then) favourite game Pentago , with similar results: I drained all the fun from it.

Haha, I did this for Wordle - same result!

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#162

Related, here is one that plays 6x6 perfectly: https://mame.github.io/6x6-reversi-oracle/ via: https://twitter.com/mametter/status/1476379841004183556 I didn't know 8x8 was unsolved until now.

I can't get one single black... it's this what perfectly means?

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#163
I'm very surprised it's a draw. It's not like chess where it's "easy" to exchange a piece for an equal one until the board is "empty" and it's a draw. (Yes, it's more complicated. I played a lot of chess until secondary school, and it's more complicated. But trading equal pieces is a good strategy to get a draw.)

In Othello the number of pieces go up and down in weird patters, so a draw is very surprising for me.

Has anyone checked the proof?

Edit: Is Othello solved for smaller boards? Can this proof be aplied to smaller boards?

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#166

I had this for the Apple ][e and would play it, obsessively. At one point I had gotten good enough against the computer that the average game took ninety seconds, with the computer taking about as much time as I did. I eventually learned how to completely beat the computer such that it had no cells of its color. I took photos of a couple of instances just as proof. After a while, that got dull so I wrote a little pro…

That's more or less coming up with one of the ideas of Core War due to Othello Implementation Boredom.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#167
It sounds like they "solved" this using 2 AI players playing "perfect" Othello?

But what if someone plays imperfect Othello? I heard Magnus Carlson will start his games with completely unorthodox opening moves to throw his opponents off kilter because they're always used to playing well-known moves. Will this AI work against that tactic as well?

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#168
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The source code is on Github? Why not run it yourself and perform the peer review? The implementation is quite straightforward

You need to prove that the code is correct, that's the tricky part. Otherwise I could just write `return true;` as the whole code and tell people to run it, it's easy, just do the peer review yourself.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#169

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.

>He will deviate fro| the sequence and you won't know the perfect responses to his moves.

Even if you don't know the moves you will know that you are in a winning / drawn position. Magnus can not find a way to get to a winning position unless you make a mistake.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#170

It sounds like they "solved" this using 2 AI players playing "perfect" Othello? But what if someone plays imperfect Othello? I heard Magnus Carlson will start his games with completely unorthodox opening moves to throw his opponents off kilter because they're always used to playing well-known moves. Will this AI work against that tactic as well?

The AI can always continue with the perfect play from that imperfect state. That is what happens in chess as you can’t fool a good chess AI by making intentionally imperfect moves (chess is not solved so we don’t know if a move is perfect or not but you get the idea)

Basically in games with no hidden information (chess, go, othello, etc) how you got into a game state does not matter. If your AI can play perfectly then it can make the perfect move from any state.

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