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Pentago Is a First-Player Win

Posted by timothy on from the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose dept.

First time accepted submitter jwpeterson writes "Like chess and go, pentago is a two player, deterministic, perfect knowledge, zero sum game: there is no random or hidden state, and the goal of the two players is to make the other player lose (or at least tie). Unlike chess and go, pentago is small enough for a computer to play perfectly: with symmetries removed, there are a mere 3,009,081,623,421,558 (3e15) possible positions. Thus, with the help of several hours on 98304 threads of Edison, a Cray supercomputer at NERSC, pentago is now strongly solved. 'Strongly' means that perfect play is efficiently computable for any position. For example, the first player wins."

5 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:different than tic tac toe or connect 4? by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, tic-tac-toe is always a tie.

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  2. Re:Comparison to Chess? by vux984 · · Score: 5, Informative

    chess
    state space complexity 10^47

    go
    9x9 - 10^38
    13x13 - 10^79
    19x19 - 10^171

  3. Re:Comparison to Chess? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to the summary, 3e15 is the number of possible positions. The number of possible positions in chess is around 4e46.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

  4. Re:Comparison to Chess? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    I love the attitude that joking about women is somehow "the reason someone is single". Tip: throughout all of the past, plenty of folks made jokes about chicks, and they had relationships the same rate as everyone else. Nowadays, it's such a fucking lie that the women will reject you for being yourself, or that you have to be a feminist, or whatever. Women are not attracted to that. Often, women are attracted to confident jerks, who think nothing of making jokes like this.

    Follow their actions, not their words. Supplicating white knights are the ones left mateless.

  5. Re:Comparison to Chess? by MrBigInThePants · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why is this insightful? He doesn't even understand the word "complexity" in the context it was used!?

    GO IS complex. Yes, the brute force complexity is stupidly large.

    But also the (non-optimal) pattern strategies that humans use and researchers ARE STUDYING (and have done for some time) are very difficult to emulate.

    I love how you just dismiss a whole field of research as if they had not bother to try anything else in the decades this has been study?!

    Sheesh...talk about failing to give people the benefit of the doubt...