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Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

2swap.github.io

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Re: Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

#11

Post by lifthrasiir »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #8

I'm surprised no one linked to his video on the topic. I can't overstate how high quality it is. The graphs are simply beautiful, and it made me think he had a whole production team behind him. That he was able to do cutting-edge work like this (it's new, which qualifies) while creating a work of art is incredible. "I Solved Connect 4" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaljD3Q3ct0

> [I]t made me think he had a whole production team behind him.

He has a program instead: https://github.com/2swap/swaptube/blob/1a0d5369d523536d48e4/... [1].

[1] Note that this commit ID is visible from the video itself: https://youtu.be/KaljD3Q3ct0?t=1002

Re: Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

#12

Post by CamelCaseName »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #8

I'm surprised no one linked to his video on the topic. I can't overstate how high quality it is. The graphs are simply beautiful, and it made me think he had a whole production team behind him. That he was able to do cutting-edge work like this (it's new, which qualifies) while creating a work of art is incredible. "I Solved Connect 4" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaljD3Q3ct0

Great channel, thanks for sharing.

I'm not clear how they came to the steady state solution, or how it is memorizable, or is it just intended to be brute forced at that point?

At some point long ago, I was bored and memorized a whole bunch of openings and intuitive rules, and would end up with a 90%+ win rate. Lots of fun.

Re: Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

#15

Post by vscode-rest »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #12
sillysaurusx wrote: post #8

I'm surprised no one linked to his video on the topic. I can't overstate how high quality it is. The graphs are simply beautiful, and it made me think he had a whole production team behind him. That he was able to do cutting-edge work like this (it's new, which qualifies) while creating a work of art is incredible. "I Solved Connect 4" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaljD3Q3ct0

Great channel, thanks for sharing. I'm not clear how they came to the steady state solution, or how it is memorizable, or is it just intended to be brute forced at that point? At some point long ago, I was bored and memorized a whole bunch of openings and intuitive rules, and would end up with a 90%+ win rate. Lots of fun.

Author used flash cards to memorize the steady state positions.

Deriving the steady state solutions was most interesting to me as well, author just described it as “a genetic algorithm”.

Re: Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

#18

Post by contraposit »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #7
contraposit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also liked the one on lambda calculus. I hope one day we will be able to find interpretation of what it actually means for PLUS Times Plus. Maybe this is how we will explore nonstandard arithmetic. What is PLUS times PLUS? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVA8Nj6HEo

Godel's incompleteness theorem lets you turn PLUS into a number, do some operations on it, and then turn it back into a symbol. So PLUS times PLUS already has a definite answer. Perhaps not a sensible one, but a definite one.

Yes it could just simply be a syntactic sugar for a complex operation taking in 4 numbers. But this reminds me of Mirror Symmetry between two theories in String Theory where complex calculations in one theory gets mapped to simple calculation in another theory. Similarly we might have translation dictionary between standard arithmetic and non-standard arithmetic where complex calculation in standard arithmetic becomes easy calculation in non-standard arithmetic.

Re: Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

#19

Post by satvikpendem »

jychang wrote: post #6
cachius wrote: post #3

This guy’s videos are awesome. He also has one on Klotski and the double pendulum. Beautiful graph animations.

OH it's that guy. His double pendulum video was orgasmic. Edit: Oh wait, no, I was thinking of the Drew's Campfire double pendulum video. That video was extra interesting because the creator is not a typical content producer. He just has a few videos without any views, then dropped what might be one of the best videos of all time, and then went back to his technical videos. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jVogdT…

That one is a great video as well, both are good to watch back to back as they go well together.

Re: Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

#20

Post by adito »

tromp wrote: post #4

> which is fundamentally different from existing strong and weak solutions It doesn't seem fundamentally different from Victor Allis' solution, but 2swap managed to generalize and streamline the rules available for static solutions, while also picking the winning moves that reduce the overall tree size. > A weak solution can be visualized in a way that a strong solution (14tb uncompressed, 350gb compressed) cannot. T…

From 350gb compressed to 12kb is pretty impressive. What makes that particular strong solution needs so much space? It's from one of the paper mentioned right?

Edit: oh, found it, it's from this repository: https://github.com/sidneycadot/connect4/blob/main/7x6/README...

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