. . .When I began this effort, my knowledge of both Othello and game-playing techniques was rudimentary....Since then, with about five man-months of effort, IAGO has been brought up to world-championship level. - Paul Rosenbloom, from A World Championship-Level Othello Program

Logistello. Maintained by Michael Buro, University of Alberta. "Logistello is one of today's strongest Othello programs. Besides the powerful hardware on which it is running and the efficient implementation of standard game-tree searching techniques, the program's considerable playing strength is mainly due to several new approaches for the construction of evaluation features, their combination, selective search, and learning from previous games." Also be sure to see his publications.

Strong Learning Othello Programs. Offered by Jay Scott as part of his Machine Learning in Games library. You'll find links to Othello programs, tournament reports, and more.

How machines have learned to play Othello, by Michael Buro. (This is one of the essays from the collection:Playing with AI. IEEE Intelligent Systems, November/December 1999.) Other papers available online from Michael Buro's collection include The IWEC-2002 Man-Machine Othello Match.

Computers, Games and the Real World. By Matthew L. Ginsberg. Scientific American (special issue: Exploring Intelligence - Winter 1998). "More than just competing with people, game-playing machines complement human thinking by offering alternative methods to solving problems."

Do not pass Go. Computers can beat the world's best chess players but have yet to master other classic games like Go. By David Levy. The Guardian (October 24, 2002). "Ever since Garry Kasparov's sensational 1997 loss to the IBM chess monster Deep Blue, the chess world has thirsted for revenge. But the first opportunity ended in failure in Bahrain on Saturday, when Kasparov's former pupil and successor as World Champion, Vladimir Kramnik, could only draw an 8-game match against one of the world's leading chess engines, Fritz. But this was just the latest in a long series of human versus computer encounters that illustrate the inexorable march of artificial intelligence (AI). It's a story that began at a Dartmouth University conference in 1956, when several of the founding fathers of AI defined the goals of that infant science. One of them was to create a computer program that could defeat the world chess champion. Success would, those scientists believed, reach to the very core of human intellectual endeavour. By the early 1990s, due in no small part to the successes achieved in computer chess, the interest of the AI community had spread to many other games of skill, including backgammon, bridge, Go and Scrabble. Where exactly are we now in this fascinating struggle?"

Robert Gatliff's Othello Page. Maintained by Robert Gatliff. Includes a bibliography of articles about computer programs for Othello, as well as links to play Othello online.

Othello. From the University of Alberta GAMES Group. A nice collection of related links.

Neurothello. From Toby Jaffey. "Neurothello is a simple interface to the game of othello for the mac. The program itself is very simple, an artificial intelligence routine is assigned to each player then executed. The game is geared towards programmers and come with a software development kit to aid in creating artificial intelligence plugins."

Related Pages

• Overview
• Bridge
• Checkers
• Chess
• Crossword Puzzles
• Go
• Poker
• Scrabble
• Traveling Salesperson & NP-Complete Problems
• More Games & Puzzles

Other References Offline

Gatliff, Robert J. Jr. Annotated bibliography of Othello programming. "Here are a number of articles related to Computers playing Othello/Reversi. Some of the articles apply their techniques to chess, but I saw their usefulness to Othello. Other articles are focus on search algorithms, without regard to game domain. The older computer Othelo articles are only of historical interest."

Lee, Kai-Fu, and Sanjoy. Mahajan 1990. The Development of a World Class Othello program. Artificial Intelligence 43: 21-36.

Levy, David N. L., and D. F. Beal, editors. 1989. Heuristic Programming in Artificial Intelligence: The First Computer Olympiad. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood. Offers 3 papers, by C. Hewlett, A. Kieru;f, and G. M. Gupton, on othello-playing programs.

Rosenbloom, Paul S. 1982. A World-Championship-Level Othello Program. In Computer Games II, ed. Levy, David L., 365-405. New York: Springer Verlag, 1988. Describes the program IAGO and compares its structure with human play in the game of Othello.