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For those interested in the game (it's popular among computer science and AI scholars), the Othello world championship is currently underway in Rome, Italy with

• bediger4000 3y ago
  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?
  • axlee 3y ago
    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.
    • Diggsey 3y ago
      Now that Othello is solved, there exist a set of rules a player can follow to guarantee a win or draw every game. It's possible (if unlikely) that a computer could sufficiently compress those rules to be memorizable (and then applicable) by a human.
      • axlee 3y ago
        Checkers have been solved 16 years ago and still see competition. A game being solved is not exactly the same as "apply this memorizable algorithm and you'll win", especially if the solution implies scanning 10^n positions for each move.
        • jfengel 3y ago
          I recall hearing that competition checkers has a randomization element at the start, to keep it more interesting. I believe checkers is strongly solved anyway, but it at least keeps people from memorizing all of the major lines.
        • forty 3y ago
          In case you wondering like me, checkers here means American checkers, played on a smaller 8x8 board. International checkers played on 10x10 board is a much bigger space to explore of course.
          • Detrytus 3y ago
            Does the board size matter here? Wouldn't the strategy from 8x8 board somehow generalize to bigger boards? The one issue that I can possibly see is even vs odd board sizes, e.g. play on 9x9 board can be a bit different than 8x8 or 10x10.
            • forty 3y ago
              Solve a 2x2 Rubik's cube and see if that helps solving a 4x4 ^^ From the computer point of view, it's more possible states to explore, so I think it makes things much harder
              • Detrytus 3y ago
                I meant: after you've analyzed the whole solution space for a smaller board, can't you come up with some heuristics, which will be applicable regardless of the board size? Checkers is a very simple game, all pieces are identical, unlike chess.
        • RetroTechie 3y ago
          That would be a fun way to define computer opponent: introduce an arbitrary amount of allowed compute power. Say, allowing a purpose designed device, but limited to 1W of power consumption. Or some fixed energy budget (J) per move. Too strong? Take it down to 0.1W, 10mW or whatever. That would degrade brute forcing as a viable approach, and bring it back to smart algorithms, clever ways to reduce the search space, etc.
    • kelsey9876543 3y ago
      They are moot because the solution is known. When a human makes a mistake the intrigue is discovering the fix to become better. In solo copetition solved games are highly fascinating because the person is racing the TAS or the solved route. In human versus human games, we can simply look up what the human did wrong. There is no cognitive challenge in answer lookup. Its just oh, he sucks he missed the move. Since its two humans competing it becomes "who sucks less" but its two losers that both suck competing. Thats the problem with competitive play of solved games, it must be solo competition against the solution.
      • addaon 3y ago
        > Since its two humans competing it becomes "who sucks less" but its two losers that both suck competing. Yeah, this is my problem with bowling and golf. If you're a professional bowler, literally your only job is to knock down the pins. Why do anything else? If you miss one, you're bad at your job. Ditto with golf -- the hole is right there, just get the ball in it! (Honestly not sure how sarcastic vs sincere I am in this comment.)
        • uxp8u61q 3y ago
          Foot races are also solved - these losers should just get a car!
          • kelsey9876543 3y ago
            Cars are not allowed in the rules of the game "foot race", therefore your solution is not valid and therefore your argument has no evidence to support your claim.
            • coldtea 3y ago
              You used this word, evidence. I don't think it means what you think it means. Parent made an argument by analogy, no evidence needs to enter the picture. At best you can say his analogy is flawed. It's not even flawed, anyway. If cars not being allowed is supposed to refute the analogy, then an obvious answer would be that Othello playing programs could also banned in Othello competitions (given that the solution can't just be internalized by a human player).
    • mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      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 backup. In other words, not losing is heavily prioritised over winning in top chess, currently. There are many possible ways to change this. My favourite is to make a win worth 3 points, and a draw 1 point. Both in tournament scoring and rating calculation. I think this would incentivise more aggressive play, and disincentivise the constant slog of the same 15 top players playing mostly draws against eachother, and barely playing in more open tournaments with a bigger rating interval.
      • mkesper 3y ago
        German soccer league followed the English and Italian league in 1994 with a three points rule. It seems to favor the better teams (with more expensive players) even more, stabilizing the championship. https://www.fiaa.at/theories/die-3-punkte-regel-und-ihre-profiteure/ https://www.fiaa.at/theories/die-3-punkte-regel-und-ihre-pro...
      • bluGill 3y ago
        Great chess players often pull out a draw from what looks like an obviously lost position. Mostly great players start playing for a win, but somewhere in the middle they realize winning is hopeless and switch to looking for a draw.
      • axlee 3y ago
        > 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.
        • 3y ago
  • graphe 3y ago
    Depends if you like 'solved' games. Are chess tournaments useless if computers are better? https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/chess-will-never-be-solved-heres-why https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/chess-will-never-be...
  • Someone 3y ago
    > Is Othello like checkers, where there were mostly draws in high level games? Othello tends to have huge score swings in the end game. I think it’s even hard to get a draw from a typical mid game position if both players were to aim for it. This result may change that, of course.
  • cvoss 3y ago
    This paper "weakly solves" Othello. That means that we know for the initial board state both 1) the final win/lose/draw outcome (it's a draw), and 2) the sequence of moves that should be taken by perfect players to get there (Figure 1, right). In particular, the paper does not "strongly solve" Othello. If you have an arbitrary board state, 1) and 2) are are not necessarily known for it. That means it's still possible to win a game by intentionally deviating from the perfect sequence and betting on the fact that your opponent doesn't know how to recover.
    • charcircuit 3y ago
      >That means it's still possible to win a game by intentionally deviating from the perfect sequence Someone with perfect strategy would have an answer for any deviation. Playing imperfectly would likely get you into a losing position. There is no way to go from a game being drawn if played perfectly to being winning if the then loser were to be using perfect strategy.
      • lcuff 3y ago
        I agree. As a nuance, (and I'm not an Othello player, but a chess player) in many positions in chess, there are many moves that, while not the best, are just slightly worse. Finding the 'refutation' for a weaker move is the measure of the strength of a player, and playing a few slightly weaker moves in a row will almost certainly take even high level players out of 'book' (the memorized sequence of best moves). At that point, the strength of the players becomes important, as opposed to how much they have memorized. The strategy, then, is to have a _slightly_ worse position from which one can recover and go on to win. Obviously, if the opponent plays perfectly, it is either a win for him or a draw. Typically the 'slightly weaker' move still keeps the game a draw. The advantage is not a game-winning sized advantage. I wonder if in Othello there are positions where there are multiple possible moves which 'preserve' the draw.
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  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Probably See: Le Sedol [1] after AlphaGo: "On 19 November 2019, Lee announced his retirement from professional play, stating that he could never be the top overall player of Go due to the increasing dominance of AI. Lee referred to them as being "an entity that cannot be defeated"" [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Sedol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Sedol
    • kadoban 3y ago
      That is one player's choice, but not even close to a majority one. Chess and Go and Checkers competitions have not disappeared after humans stopped being the best players of them.
    • JoeDaDude 3y ago
      IN what could be interpreted as irony, Lee Seedol went on to invent more board games. https://www.dicebreaker.com/series/wizstone/news/go-player-designs-abstract-games https://www.dicebreaker.com/series/wizstone/news/go-player-d...
    • nimih 3y ago
      Someone should probably let Shin Jinseo know that the Go world championships are now "moot", because he appears to still spend a lot of time training and practicing for them.
  • bluecalm 3y ago
    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 remember the solution you may just as well start learning top engine lines today.
    • tromp 3y ago
      Weakly solved is a computational notion that has nothing to do with how well humans and computers play. We are far from proving the game theoretic value of Chess. Even for proving that White has a draw; i.e. that White is not in zugzwang in the starting position. We may feel very strongly that the notion is absurd, but I doubt we'll see a proof in my lifetime.
    • coldtea 3y ago
      "Solved" in TFA sense is about a class of proofs being discovered, not about merely digital chess software playing better (even if they win every game).
      • bluecalm 3y ago
        Yeah but this is not very useful concept in practical play and that was the context of my comment. Chess is at different stage today than it was a few years ago. The difference is that no matter what resources and how much time your opponent have they will not beat you as long as you remember the line shown by your home PC. I call it "weakly solved in practice" because it's exactly that: our (chess players) reality today is exactly the same as if chess was actually weakly solved.
        • coldtea 3y ago
          >Yeah but this is not very useful concept in practical play and that was the context of my comment. This depends on whether the solution can be "memorized" so to speak. For games where it can, it makes playing meaningless.
  • rc_mob 3y ago
    I don't understand this comment. Computers are not allowed to play in the championship.
    • bediger4000 3y ago
      I confess to being dumb and not understanding it's a human championship. My bad!
  • waveBidder 3y ago
    chess engines are good enough to be effectively solved compared to human play, so not really more than chess tournaments.