An Othello game is solved by a computer scientist

Othello game

Anyone who has ever played tic tac toe has most likely figured out that as long as neither player commits a mistake, the game can always be drawn. It is, in fact, very easy to write an algorithm that ensures a win or a draw, independent of the opponent’s movements.

This is a simple illustration of a “solved” game, or one in which the result is known from the outset. While many of the others have not been resolved, many others have.

According to Othello game theorists and computer scientists, the quantity of alternative positions typically determines how difficult a game is to solve. In the case of Connect 4, for instance, there are 4,531,985,219,092 possible spots on a 6×7 grid. In 1988, computer scientists found a solution by demonstrating that the first player can always force a win.

Billion Billlion

The game Checkers, sometimes known as Draughts, is infinitely more intricate, with 500 billion potential board positions. It wasn’t until 2007 that computer scientists proved that the game is always drawn if both teams play flawlessly.

Othello, also known as Reversi, is a game of 10 to the power of 28 locations. Hiroki Takizawa, a bioinformatician at Preferred Networks, a computing business in Japan, has now solved the game. “Solving Othello, determining the outcome of a game with no mistake made by either player, has long been a grand challenge in computer science,” says Takizawa, before announcing that “Othello is now solved.”

Invented in England in 1883, Othello is a two-player board game that is played on an 8×8 grid. The game gained popularity in the 1970s in Japan, the United States, and other nations, and since 1977 (apart from the COVID-19 epidemic), the World Championships have been held annually.
Counters are positioned on the board by players in alternating orders, with the black or white side facing up. What makes this game special is that when black counters are framed by counters of the opposite color, you can transform them from black to white and vice versa. The game is challenging because of how difficult it is for human players to gaze ahead due to this flipping.

Naturally, computer algorithms are unaffected by this and have been consistently outperforming human players since the 1990s. Takizawa has now altered Edax, a program that uses one of these techniques, to solve the game via brute force.

This has been made possible by two causes. Takizawa divided the work into more manageable portions after modifying Edax to make it more appropriate for this type of Othello problem-solving. After 14 of the 50 available squares on the board had been occupied, he examined the issue. When there were just 36 vacant spots remaining, he took another look.

He then used Preferred Networks’ MN-J supercomputing cluster to run his software. MN-3, which is now rated as the 11th most powerful supercomputer globally in terms of energy efficiency (it was ranked #1 in 2020), is part of this cluster.

Brute Force

The outcome is a brute force demonstration that a draw occurs when both players play flawlessly.

That creates the basis for a computer program that consistently plays the ideal game. “The Othello outcome represents a significant accomplishment for humanity,” Takizawa remarks, possibly exaggerating a touch.

There might be issues with Takizawa’s evidence. For a long time, mathematicians have expressed worry that computer proofs are unreliable since it is impossible to determine whether a computer error happened.

Takizawa is aware of this. “Naturally, computational errors due to CPU or memory faults cannot be entirely ruled out,” he states. “However, as the vast majority of calculations were executed on a computer cluster with Error Checking and Correction memory, we believe the results to be nearly indisputable.”

What’s next for computer scientists who enjoy playing games? Takizawa hypothesizes that the next game to be solved as a big challenge might be chess. But that’s going to need a lot more work. In chess, there are an astounding 10 to the power of 43 game positions.

According to Takizawa, in order to solve this search space, theoretical advances in addition to processing power alone will be necessary.

Computer Scientist Solves The Game of Othello (msn.com)

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