Pentago Is a First-Player Win

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Pentago Is a First-Player Win

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 23, 2014 @05:34AM 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."

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Comparison to Chess? by jratcliffe · 2014-01-23 05:42 · Score: 4, Interesting

Out of curiousity, does anybody know what the number for chess that compares to the 3e15 number for pentago is? In other words, how much "bigger" is chess?
1. Re:Comparison to Chess? by vux984 · 2014-01-23 05:50 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  chess
  state space complexity 10^47
  go
  9x9 - 10^38
  13x13 - 10^79
  19x19 - 10^171
2. Re:Comparison to Chess? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 05:58 · 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
3. Re:Comparison to Chess? by noh8rz10 · 2014-01-23 06:05 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  keep it classy man. ha ha, women. double ha ha, menses. and yet you're still single, how can that be?
4. Re:Comparison to Chess? by MrBigInThePants · 2014-01-23 07:06 · 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...
Chess by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 05:44 · Score: 5, Funny

After playing in chess tournaments for 20 years, I have strongly solved that chess is a forced win for any player facing me.
Re:different than tic tac toe or connect 4? by mrchaotica · 2014-01-23 05:48 · Score: 4, Informative

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

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Re:Grammar? by zerosomething · 2014-01-23 06:04 · Score: 5, Funny

Can't the editors write a headline that meets the basic rules of grammar? How about "In the game of Pentago the first player can always win", or "Pentago is strongly solved".
No cause with out those grammar mistakes their would be 30 pricent fuer com-mints on /.

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Wargames... by Rhaban · 2014-01-23 06:06 · Score: 5, Funny

If Matthew Broderick had played pentago, the computer would have concluded the first country launching a nuclear missile always wins the war.
Il came close
Re:Grammar? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 06:08 · Score: 5, Funny

No, now that Pentago is solved, we're reduced to online games of Pedant.
HINT: Last player always wins.
Re:A rough approx. is 10^60 moves by Kyont · 2014-01-23 10:01 · Score: 3, Funny

Plus, where would you put the chess board?

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