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Othello Is Solved?

arxiv.org

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Re: Othello Is Solved?

#171

Post by CyberDildonics »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #140
CyberDildonics wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People see something behaving based on some very simple rules and assume that it is “thinking”.

This is just repeating what you said before, but who are these 'people' that you're talking about?

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#172

Post by bluecalm »

coldtea wrote: post #126
bluecalm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess is weakly solved for all practical purposes (it's not proven but no one is able to show a winning sequence for white even with weeks to prepare vs a top engine playing with something like 30 minutes per move) and it doesn't affect the competition at all. It's impossible to remember it all anyway. Once/if chess is formally weakly solved it will change exactly nothing for human chess players. If your plan is to r…

"Solved" in TFA sense is about a class of proofs being discovered, not about merely digital chess software playing better (even if they win every game).

Yeah but this is not very useful concept in practical play and that was the context of my comment. Chess is at different stage today than it was a few years ago. The difference is that no matter what resources and how much time your opponent have they will not beat you as long as you remember the line shown by your home PC.

I call it "weakly solved in practice" because it's exactly that: our (chess players) reality today is exactly the same as if chess was actually weakly solved.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#173

Post by jonahx »

sonofhans wrote: post #116
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…

That is super cool. I’ve played Mankala for years and would love to hear more. It’s instructive to see old Africans playing Mankala. They play very fast. It can become more like poker, where deceit is a part of the game. If you spam down your stones fast enough sometimes you can skip a bowl, or drop an extra stone, in order to gain advantage. I’m not facile enough to play this way, and I play with family and so don’t…

> They play very fast. It can become more like poker, where deceit is a part of the game. If you spam down your stones fast enough sometimes you can skip a bowl, or drop an extra stone, in order to gain advantage.

What you describe is just a talent at cheating, and I assume against the rules of the game. In poker, bluffing is an explicit part of the game allowed by the rules. I wouldn't even call it "deceit" in that context. At the very least, these are highly distinct categories of deceit.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#175

Post by mumintrollet »

gmac wrote: post #41

If anyone fancies playing the game, I made this for/with my kids: https://jawj.github.io/fliptiles (The ‘AI’ player is very weak)

Impressive! I used to play this all the time as a kid but I kinda forgot it existed for a while, so this was fun :) I scored 31 against the computer's 33 :/

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#177

Post by 542458 »

doikor wrote: post #170
blindriver wrote: post #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?

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 the…

> you can’t fool a good chess AI by making intentionally imperfect moves

You actually used to be able to. That’s part of how Kasparov beat Deep Blue in ‘96 IIRC - by forcing the game into unusual situations where the computer would have fewer prior games to pattern match off. But by the rematch heuristics for “off book” situations had improved, and the same strategies failed (or even backfired).

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#178

Post by Tepix »

gus_massa wrote: post #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…

The most promising lines have long (decades) been known to result in a draw. There wasn't enough CPU power to brute force the entire search space.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#179

Post by weatherlight »

jonahx wrote: post #173
sonofhans wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is super cool. I’ve played Mankala for years and would love to hear more. It’s instructive to see old Africans playing Mankala. They play very fast. It can become more like poker, where deceit is a part of the game. If you spam down your stones fast enough sometimes you can skip a bowl, or drop an extra stone, in order to gain advantage. I’m not facile enough to play this way, and I play with family and so don’t…

> They play very fast. It can become more like poker, where deceit is a part of the game. If you spam down your stones fast enough sometimes you can skip a bowl, or drop an extra stone, in order to gain advantage. What you describe is just a talent at cheating, and I assume against the rules of the game. In poker, bluffing is an explicit part of the game allowed by the rules. I wouldn't even call it "deceit" in that…

Sometimes there's an implicit its only cheating if you get caught.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#180

Post by kbenson »

WoodenChair wrote: post #158
kbenson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The post I'm replying to said: > It's not obvious to me that othello is much more complicated than checkers. How is that not saying it's trivial when the context is a thread mentioning that Checkers has already been solved.

In the past, "solving" games has often been done through novel changes in hardware and/or approaches and algorithms as I understand it. The person you replied to stated that they didn't know why Othello was an achievement beyond checkers. That doesn't mean it's trivial, but it also doesn't mean it required any additional insight or advances to do so if it's not specifically more complicated than checkers.

They then went on to qualify their statement with the information that they don't specifically remember the rules of Othello. In a discussion held in good faith, this should be assumed to be an invitation to add additional insight as to why Othello might be more complicated.

You either know the reason why and didn't state it, or believe it's more complicated based on authorities you trust and didn't relate that and instead stated it authoritatively, or don't know it at all and misrepresented it. None of those are very useful for discussion. The former two are easy to rectify by explaining, qualifying, or referring someone to additional info though, and would have been a more useful way to respond.

Ultimately though, it sort of feels like you're reaching for an additional interpretation that makes an earlier misinterpretation still valid, when you could just say "oops. Most of my comment still stands as accurate, but I guess I misinterpreted your point."

Edit: from looking at you profile, it appears you are a CS professor. Perhaps part of the issue is context. This is a public forum, not a classroom, and while in a classroom your statements can be taken with an assumed authority, nobody necessarily knows that about you here when you post, so some additional qualification of your statements or background may be warranted.

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