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Othello Is Solved?

arxiv.org

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Re: Othello Is Solved?

#231

Post by Scarblac »

charcircuit wrote: post #169
SonOfLilit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That'll be very little help if the perfect game you have starts with 1.e4, but Magnus plays 1.d4. Yes, you're not losing, congratulations. You're still on your own against Carlsen now.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#232

Post by thret »

furyofantares wrote: post #215
elwell wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can become more like poker, where deceit is a part of the game. I wouldn't equate skipping a bowl with bluffing. Maybe, palming a chip as you put your bet in: which certainly isn't "part of the game".

I also wouldn't equate it with bluffing at all, but from the description, maybe also not palming a chip. It's possible for something that's cheating among one group to be a part of the game among another. Sports have a lot of things that are in some sense against the rules, but standard penalties are applied if caught, and it's just a part of the game, like fouling a player in basketball. Nobody considers it cheating…

Fouling isn't cheating because it's accidental. If it were deliberate, it would be cheating.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#233

Post by transcriptase »

nemo44x wrote: post #220
weatherlight wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you’re not cheating you’re not trying.

The stats from various anti-cheat companies like Vanguard, PunkBuster, and BattleEye demonstrate that some nationalities/cultures believe this more than others.

Even when you adjust for population and CD key pricing.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#234

Post by klodolph »

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…

Cheating is against the rules in mancala, but perhaps, part of the culture of the game. If you’re caught, you retract the move.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#235

Post by axlee »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #49
axlee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it render human games moot? Why would a software participate in a championship? The draw percentage in checkers/draught and in chess are roughly similar, (anywhere between 50% and 60% at high-level play), despite checkers being solved and chess not.

And honestly I think the draw percentage in chess is influenced just as much by sociological processes as it is by game theoretic concerns. The very top chess players are extremely risk averse. Chess is way too complex for humans to ever be able to play perfectly in sufficiently complex positions, honestly. The top players today obsessively avoid positions like that unless they can find a forced drawing line as a bac…

> In other words, not losing is heavily prioritised over winning in top chess, currently.

It's more that once you are in a losing position, winning is extremely difficult, and a draw is often the best thing you can achieve.

From there on, the losing side cares about not losing (because winning is almost impossible), but the winning side stills tries to win. Great chess players are the ones who can turn a losing position into a draw, or prevent draws from a winning position.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#236

Post by david422 »

earthboundkid wrote: post #199
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in monopoly you don’t have to pay rent if the property owner doesn’t notice.

In Bullshit, I always felt that if you could trick them into taking the hand or not noticing you added an extra card, it was all part of the game.

3 queens ... and slide a 4th card sideways underneath.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#237

Post by kbenson »

WoodenChair wrote: post #224
kbenson wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reread my comments in "good faith" as you say and you won't need to write four paragraphs critiquing my one paragraph comment.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of good faith or not to see that you were responding to statements that not only the person you're responding to didn't say, but weren't actually said by the original person (trivia != trivial). That said, I assumed you actually care about what you are communicating, so provided what I thought was constructive criticism.

I guess you're either in a frame of mind you can accept it as it was meant or you aren't.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#238

Post by password4321 »

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…

https://sheabunge.github.io/mancala/

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#239

Post by gus_massa »

entelechy0 wrote: post #154

Because Othello is in PSPACE, and NP is in PSPACE, does this mean that P=NP?

The preprint claims to have solved the standard 8x8 board. The result probably applied to smaller boards and perhaps wit some tweaks to slighty bigger boards (10x10???).

To conclude something about P ?= NP, they would have to have solved the NxN board for all N.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#240

Post by jchook »

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…

Starting with a 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, etc board size seems like a reasonable strategy for developing an intuition of the solution.
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