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Othello Is Solved?

arxiv.org

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Re: Othello Is Solved?

#181

Post by kjellsbells »

keitmo wrote: post #79
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…

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).

Not the article you mention but there is a fun article in this BYTE from 1981 on a computer Othello tournament that really illustrates how far we've come. This edition of tha mag is also notable for its point in time history, as it has an editorial about the coming IBM PC and quanit ads from Apple and Microsoft that give no clue as to the revolution coming.

https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198107_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#182

Post by marssaxman »

qubex wrote: post #130
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…

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

I carefully refrained from building an actual word-ladder solver, for that reason - instead I have a little dictionary-explorer script which will show me the next two layers of the tree, should I get stuck.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#183

Post by kibwen »

Y_Y wrote: post #144
gtbcb wrote: post #129

I would love a Wikipedia list article of games that have been solved computationally and but also games where humans can still beat computers / AI, discussing the challenges and context behinds wins / losses.

Are there any board games left where humans beat the best computers? On a related note, are there any Wikipedia list articles which are empty lists?

> Are there any board games left where humans beat the best computers?

Rest assured that no computer will ever dominate a human opponent at Candyland.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#186

Post by kreetx »

bluGill wrote: post #147
leoff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine finding a pamphlet written by God that contains a listing of a perfect game of chess 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.

You don't, you trust that God has proved.

I don't get then, how the paper "solves Othello": how does it determine the perfect game (why is it perfect)?

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#187

Post by grensley »

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…

I can't remember the source for it (help me out if you know it), but people only like to play games when they're in the band of 30-70% winrate. Win too much or too little, and they'll stop enjoying playing the game.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#188

Post by codr7 »

Dang, brings back memories from AI class at university.

We had an expert Othello player in our class who helped with fleshing out strategies for scoring the boards, in the end it was pretty difficult to beat.

Used alpha-beta if memory serves.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#189

Post by nimih »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18
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?

Probably See: Le Sedol [1] after AlphaGo: "On 19 November 2019, Lee announced his retirement from professional play, stating that he could never be the top overall player of Go due to the increasing dominance of AI. Lee referred to them as being "an entity that cannot be defeated"" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Sedol

Someone should probably let Shin Jinseo know that the Go world championships are now "moot", because he appears to still spend a lot of time training and practicing for them.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#190

Post by coldtea »

bluecalm wrote: post #172
coldtea wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 t…

>Yeah but this is not very useful concept in practical play and that was the context of my comment.

This depends on whether the solution can be "memorized" so to speak. For games where it can, it makes playing meaningless.

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