Yeah we were aware of the swap rule, but it didn't really help our enthusiasm at the time because (1) it seemed then the second player would gain the same advan

Yeah we were aware of the swap rule, but it didn't really help our enthusiasm at the time because (1) it seemed then the second player would gain the same advantage, and (2) it seemed to theoretically turn the whole game into one of knowing which opening moves would lead to a guaranteed win, like knowing when to swap, which isn't as interesting. This was awhile ago though, long before AI solutions to Go and Chess, and what we were reading wasn't that detailed. It seems like the game trees are much harder to know a priori than was our impression at the time, at least for sufficiently large boards. It still makes me wonder but maybe is more complex than I thought. Seeing it here on HN has kinda rekindled my interest in it. I will admit in general, these AI approaches to boardgames has kinda changed the way I think about them, from puzzles to think about with a companion to a giant math problem to solve once or so forever for all humankind. It's kinda shifted my interest to the possibility of games where it's harder to develop an AI that could "solve" the game in an algorithmic sense (I was going to say in the sense that there is a program whose probability of winning is equal to or exceeds any other player, but I'm not sure if that's right, because if AI had a 0.5 probability that would be more interesting).