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From: kvr@nikhefk.UUCP (kees van rijn)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,rec.games.misc,rec.games.board
Subject: intercontinental  computer - othello  match
Message-ID: <248@nikhefk.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Oct-87 21:17:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: nikhefk.248
Posted: Mon Oct  5 21:17:50 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Oct-87 02:28:08 EDT
Reply-To: kvr@nikhefk.UUCP (kees van rijn)
Followup-To: rec.games.misc
Organization: Nikhef-K, Amsterdam (the Netherlands).
Lines: 64
Keywords: othello
Xref: mnetor comp.ai:855 rec.games.misc:953 rec.games.board:433


      INTERCONTINENTAL  COMPUTER - OTHELLO  MATCH


Last saturday there was a computer-othello match of
MY TURN in The Netherlands with
BILL in the USA.

MY TURN has been written by Cas Wilders and won the
preceding local mini-tournament in Amsterdam with
REV87 (by Joost Buys),
MAST87 (by Ron Kroonenberg) and
BADIA1.2 (by Marcel van Tien).

BILL is vice-champion of the USA since last US' tournament,
some years ago.
BILL has been written by Kai-Fu Lee and Sanjoy Mahajan.

Communication between Pittsburgh USA
and Amsterdam NL took place via EARN / BITNET.

After this match, there were also games of
REV87 and MAST87 with BILL via this communication channel.

All games were won by BILL.

In the first match MY TURN got low mobility because of
a wrong move in the beginning. It was hopeless to continue
and Cas resigned. For the other two games, the level of the
participants was probably near equal, though initially REV87
had also problems with mobility, but it recovered.
For non-experts in othello, like me, it is however very difficult
to estimate the real value of a position.

All of us agreed that it is a very hard job to improve
strength of the programs further with known techniques.
According to Kai-Fu, faster machines lead only to marginal
improvement, and better search algorithm is too hard.
We think that most improvement of last years is from implementation
of specific othello knowledge into the programs.

However, probably the level of present programs is so
high, that in a tournament of best computer programs with
best human players, computers will win more than 80% of
the games.

Technically, the communication channel was good, though exact
time checking was impossible because of a delay of
about 5 seconds before a move arrived. This time is not
garanteed, and it is also not yet possible for the participants
to check the time that a message was sent.

Another problem was that backspaces from Amsterdam were not
executed, but turned into periods, so that careful typing was
required. We were later told that delete probably would
have been effective.
And sometimes, messages from other people were disturbing
clear communication.

Generally speaking however, the match passed off very successfully.


kees van rijn
(organizepon