Pentago Is a First-Player Win

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."

Comments

Re:different than tic tac toe or connect 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are always losing as the second person in tic-tac-toe, you might want to lay off the drugs or stop posting on Slashdot as your IQ is too low.

Re:Comparison to Chess?

[Kjella]

three orders of magnitude added 5 out of 28 days

Somehow 10^194 doesn't seem significantly worse than 10^191.