the other day im playing at playok and was playing several othello games; i was losing each one. i dont mind, im new at this game and losing is part of the process. But while i was playin a chat window opened and this fellow told me, out of the blue, that i can use an othello program. maybe he was watching my games and felt sad…i dont know, but his advice was to cheat.

is my 1rst time this have happened to me. i have play GO, chess, backgammon and others but never someone had ask me to cheat. maybe there is something about othello that impulse people to cheat.

by the way, i did an experiment. instead of playing the games with 10 minutes each, i reduce it to 3; thinking that maybe a game within 3 minutes wont give time to cheat to some players. i win a few after this.

Maybe the Pope is a catholic.

NO! Really? I was sure he was buddhist…

The problem with Othello/Reversi is that computers are greatly superior to human beings because the game is so complex (each move can change the color of up to 22 discs and the whole game).

Unfortunately, this is why many great players avoid turn-based sites and choose instead to play only 1 or 2 minutes games.

well, technically the reason computers are so good is because the game is so simple mathematically compared to chess/go etc, but I see your point.

I don't know how to play go, but I think the major difference between chess and Othello is that in chess only one piece is moved each time (two in castling but you can only do that at most once) while in Othello some pieces are moved constantly. On average you make 30 moves in an Othello game, but you actually move from a minimum of two to a maximum of twenty-two pieces. I've never actually counted how many flips are made in a regular game, but I'm willing to bet you can easily pass 500 moves between the two players in a game.

yea, the logic and nature of the game is more counter intuitive than chess, hence figuring out whats going on can be more confusing i guess. So in human terms perhaps its initialyl harder for the brain to figure out the lines and combinations. But computers don't have to worry about it from that perspective and can work with it purely in terms of number of combinations and permutations etc. And in that sense othello is somewhat simpler than chess. Game complexities measured as 10^{58 for othello, 10}123 for chess apparantly. Which basically just means computers can figure out how to play othello perfectly in a much shorter time than it would take to play chess to the same degree of perfection.

and since the common strategy is to reduce your opponent's possible moves, the better the computer plays, the faster it plays, and so on.

can't say I can see the relation.

Basically it is as magic_jim says. If the computer can see 5 ply he his going to be a very good Othello player but only and average Chess player because humans can see much further into the move tree in chess than in othello.

Just as a side note, people play blindfold chess, never heard of it in othello…

how much computing does a computer have to do if a computer's opponent has 2 possible moves? 12 possible moves?

chess is massively popular compared to othello, just becuse you haven't heard of it, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

It's not a matter of popularity but of complexity. There are not too many moves in Othello, but way more pieces change during a single move. If you're whatching a chess game played at Starbucks, go to use the bathroom and come back after nine or ten moves have been played, you can probably go back and figure out what happened. In Othello (in particular in the mid-game), that's v impossible. What pedropajarito says is very true: it's possible to play chess blindfolded, but not Othello. That's not saying chess does not exist. It's just explaining why computers are impossible to beat at Othello.

“that's v impossible” should read “that's virtually impossible”

I can play Othello blinfolded.

My performance is comparable to when I see the board :)