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Othello Is Solved?

arxiv.org

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Re: Othello Is Solved?

#241

Post by couchand »

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…

I'm not sure I agree with this take on basketball strategy. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that intentionally fouling in basketball is largely a time-management move? Like, you want to be "caught" because that's the whole point -- you aren't seeking an advantage in play that the penalty is meant to offset, you're seeking the penalty.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#242

Post by sdwr »

grensley wrote: post #187
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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH10TsgozG8&t=26s

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#243

Post by PaulHoule »

thret wrote: post #232
furyofantares wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might be accidental and it might not.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#244

Post by furyofantares »

couchand wrote: post #241
furyofantares wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure I agree with this take on basketball strategy. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that intentionally fouling in basketball is largely a time-management move? Like, you want to be "caught" because that's the whole point -- you aren't seeking an advantage in play that the penalty is meant to offset, you're seeking the penalty.

Time management are an extreme scenario, NOT the main use of fouls.

Fouls are conserved and used throughout the game. They're usually somewhere between intentional and accidental - you'd rather get your hand on the ball and not foul if you can. But you'd often rather foul than they get the 2 points if those are your only options. And how many fouls you have left against their best shooters is a major consideration throughout the game.

There's an anecdote about some Kobe Bryant trash talk that I think demonstrates both that fouls are valued for stopping 2 points, but ALSO the per-player foul limit is an additional consideration and separate strategic consideration.

> So we were playing, and you know it was like a two-on-one break. And, Caron Butler fouls and stops the break. So everybody was like, "Good job! That stop stops two points."

> So, Kobe comes out... and we’re all like, "Good, Good. You saved two points."

> Kobe walks over to him and says, "Hey, who are you guarding?", and Butler responds, "You!", and he goes, "Huh... How many fouls you got?". And Caron says, "I got one!" and Kobe says, "So you only got five left? Well, you need all six fouls to guard me, and you just wasted one... on him! It’s a stupid... stupid play!"

> And you had to think about it like... "God, he’s right!"

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#245

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#246

Post by cvoss »

Asraelite wrote: post #145
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.

"Weakly solved" does actually imply that perfect strategy. I think you're referring to "ultra-weakly solved", which seems to be what the paper did.

A "weak solution" demonstrates perfect play from the initial state and merely implies the existence of a perfect strategy for the entire tree of game states, but, crucially, need not actually produce said strategy. Doing so would be a "strong solution."

An "ultra-weak solution" is even less. It gives the win/lose/draw outcome of the perfect strategy, without producing that strategy, nor even producing the game of perfect play from the initial state.

This is all covered in the second paragraph of the paper's introduction.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#247

Post by SamBam »

bee_rider wrote: post #198
kiviuq wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The game was played by enslaved Africans to foster community and develop social skills." ..cringe...

I don’t get it, what makes you want to cringe?

"Bowling is a game played by American males to develop social skills."

Doesn't that sentence sound bizarre to you? Is that why people bowl? And isn't the implication that American males need help learning social skills?

They played the game for the same reasons that all humans have played games for millennia.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#248

Post by SamBam »

bluecalm wrote: post #43
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?

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…

Chess isn't remotely solved. AlphaZero trounced StockFish, playing moves that StockFish never thought possible. Meanwhile, some say that StockFish has since caught up. But regardless, if cheese engines keep getting better and bearing previous ones, then in no way can you say that any current engine has "solved" chess because a different version will beat it next year.

"Solved" doesn't mean "beats humans."

I see your point about what "solved" would mean for humans, though.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#249

Post by Asraelite »

cvoss wrote: post #246
Asraelite wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Weakly solved" does actually imply that perfect strategy. I think you're referring to "ultra-weakly solved", which seems to be what the paper did.

A "weak solution" demonstrates perfect play from the initial state and merely implies the existence of a perfect strategy for the entire tree of game states, but, crucially, need not actually produce said strategy. Doing so would be a "strong solution." An "ultra-weak solution" is even less. It gives the win/lose/draw outcome of the perfect strategy, without producing that strategy, nor even producing the game of per…

So are the definitions in the Wikipedia article then wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game

And if a strategy for perfect play only from the initial position is a strong solution, then what do you call the even more strongly solved case of a strategy for perfect play from any position?

The second paragraph of the paper isn't super specific about its definition for "weakly solved", but I read it as agreeing with my statement. It also calls checkers "weakly solved", a game for which a strategy to beat any possible move is known.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#250

Post by b33j0r »

devit wrote: post #94
sdwr wrote: post #10

> Next, we selected 2,587 positions out of the aforementioned 2,958,551 positions and formulated hypotheses regarding their outcomes. We chose them such that if all these hypotheses were proven correct, it would prove that the initial position results in a draw. But no elaboration? Sounds to me like the game is not solved, instead the author looked pretty hard for a winning line, and didn't find one.

They computed results for a bunch of 36-empty-squares positions on their clusters and uploaded them to https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Analyses_of_the_Game_o... The script at https://github.com/eukaryo/reversi-scripts/blob/main/reversi... plays perfectly (assuming the whole thing is correct) a bunch of data computed by other scripts in the repository using the 36-empty-squares solutions, for which a regular mac…

I’m not taking a stance on “Othello is solved”, but offer a digression about a lookup table being a valid solution to a tractable problem, or its subproblem.

I don’t see a lot of people saying this (not parent either), but I know that many hope for closed-form solutions to things, even secretly.

It just dang doesn’t look that way anymore. Weird when a finite set is sufficient to prove subproblems that cover a perplexingly different or larger domain.

Whether a proof is accepted or not, we’ll still kinda wonder on the structure of special cases in computational complexity. They seem to work unreasonably well, and we rarely find them by hand/brainmeat.

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