Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamflimflam1 | Hacker News Reader

Othello is a great game to demonstrate how powerful some basic heuristics can be.

There are certain squares that you should avoid placing pebble on as the game develops - equally there are squares that you should definitely try and place a pebble on if you can.

Implementing these rules can give you a fairly decent opponent and it's interesting to see how quickly people will ascribe "intelligence" to something that is very simple.

View on HN

I read an article many years ago on programing Othello. I think it was BYTE Magazine, circa early 1980s. It mentioned pitting an app using a simple heuristic technique similar to the one you describe against an app using an equally simple (but devastatingly horrible) "flip the most squares" approach.

The heuristic algorithm won by a landslide -- 60 to 4 or worse (I don't remember exactly).

Not the article you mention but there is a fun article in this BYTE from 1981 on a computer Othello tournament that really illustrates how far we've come. This edition of tha mag is also notable for its point in time history, as it has an editorial about the coming IBM PC and quanit ads from Apple and Microsoft that give no clue as to the revolution coming.

https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198107_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...

I read that same byte article, wrote a basic version that played the heuristic way, and was unable to beat it. Good times.

A very effective heuristic is to count the number of legal moves for each player.

Yeah, I remember my ~200 lines Pascal program running on PDP-11 beat everyone in the lab, that was quite astonishing. It completely solved the rest of the game when 19 free spaces remained.

Implementing these rules can give you a fairly decent opponent and it's interesting to see how quickly people will ascribe "intelligence" to something that is very simple.

Who is actually "ascribing intelligence" to this? Othello has been on $10 LCD games that take double AA batteries.

People see something behaving based on some very simple rules and assume that it is “thinking”.

This is just repeating what you said before, but who are these 'people' that you're talking about?

Me. I am one of the people mentioned.

I haphazardly ascribe intelligence to too many things.

Well it's distilled thinking, isn't it?

Someone had to come up with the heuristics and then baked it into rigid rules. For the outside observer it's impossible to tell if it's baked or if it's being intelligently decided on the fly.

> Double AA

So you mean AAAA?

I actually remember those things taking two AA batteries, so I may have flubbed my way into something that is still technically true.

Back in the day, when normal people hadn't been exposed to these things (let alone understand them), there was a strong tendency for people to ascribe intelligence to them. Making that sort of mistake really is a strong human tendency that has to be guarded against.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com