221–230 of 285 posts
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…
> The Othello result is a monumental achievement for humanity Imagine having the hubris to describe your own paper like this.
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.
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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 w…
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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…
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Mancala and connect four are classic examples of solved games. computer scientist vs. an optometrist. What does being an optometrist have to do with anything?
It’s a joke. As in “CS vs Optometry, who will win in the mancala battle of the century?!”
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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.
> 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.