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Othello Is Solved?

arxiv.org

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Re: Othello Is Solved?

#251

Post by Raidion »

tialaramex wrote: post #48
sebzim4500 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of "weakly solved" is not original to this effort. IIRC checkers was weakly solved for years but is now strongly solved.

And you can go further Heads Up (ie two player) Limit (ie you decide to raise or not, the size of the raise is fixed) Texas Hold 'Em (the style of Poker most played today) is essentially weakly solved. The process used generates a statistical approximation and tells you how close it is to correct, in theory a perfect solution would beat this by that amount, in practice of course Poker is a game of chance, and so over…

Poker being one of my favorite hobbies (probably 300k hands played lifetime), it's wild how much variance matters. Like a 4BB/100 winrate (aka you win 4 big blinds every 100 hands) is very much an "I can be a professional" winrate.

You have a ~10% chance over 100k hands to be Professional players do actually get in statistically significant sample sizes, but for amateur players, most don't get enough hands to really understand their skill level.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#252

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

axlee wrote: post #235
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 posit…

Then why do we see superGMs constantly bail out for a draw when they're not losing, sometimes even in a better position? And consistently play quiet, safe openings, instead of sharper, if more dubious stuff. Sometimes the position is completely equal with plenty of play left and they instead manufacture a draw via repetition for no reason.

Yet occasionally we see players throw out unsound openings and they work out just fine because they're so complex and sharp they're hard to refute.

I understand how chess play works, being a tournament player myself. My point is not on the mechanics of chess, but the psychology of these players as a result of being brought up in a chess world where risk averse play is strongly awarded.

Ultimately, the core problem here is that these players choose to play in a way that leads to more draws, not that they're so unbelievably strong that it's almost impossible for them to beat eachother.

Just look at computer chess. They're way beyond human capability, and yet they still don't play perfectly. That should tell you how large the gulf is between current human play and perfect or even close to perfect play.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#253

Post by lukasb »

So the perfect game is played to a draw - does this mean that competitive play is over? Or is it impractical for human players to memorize the moves required to punish deviation from the perfect game?

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#254

Post by vasco »

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.

> unless you make a mistake.

That's the easiest part.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#255

Post by otteromkram »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #171
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Me. I am one of the people mentioned.

I haphazardly ascribe intelligence to too many things.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#256

Post by archon810 »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #133
dzolob wrote: post #82

For those of you who think Othello is trivial, try Zebra. Original author’s website: http://radagast.se/othello/ A github source: https://github.com/hoshir/zebra

for those not getting what is "Othello" - it is also called Reversi

Reversi is what I grew up playing back in Ukraine. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it's popular (well, relatively) in the US as well under the Othello name and have taught both of my kids to play it too. They love it, and I love playing it with them.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#257

Post by EGreg »

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…

When I was 14 and in my first year of college, the lady teaching my course in C gave me a project for an extra grade (because I had skipped a lot of classes, I think). Anyway, it was to program Mancala in C, which I did using Allegro Library I think at the time. Fun times!

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#258

Post by simondebbarma »

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)

Not sure how impressive a draw is, but I did a 32-32 for my first play through. Thanks for teaching me a new game!

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#259

Post by rocqua »

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.

Is it really symmetric?

I imagine generally the upper limit on always winning is higher. As in, usually the person consistently losing wants to stop playing before the player consistently winning.

Re: Othello Is Solved?

#260

Post by WoodenChair »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #228
WoodenChair wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think either Othello or Checkers are trivial to solve. Checkers was solved over 18 years.

I didn't say Checkers was trivial to solve. I said Othello is much harder to solve than Checkers and therefore not trivial to solve as OP implied.

I think the OP was saying that since Checkers is solved and they "think" Othello is similar it would be easy to solve, implying that since we can do one we can do the other. I was disputing that notion.

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