On Saturday 23rd January 2021 22.57 UTC Xavier Blanvillain of France announced after many years of trying that he had solved the game of Oware using a multi-treaded brute force algorithm. his program calculated all 827,240,309,058 possible positions. How do you feel about Oware being solved?
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You mean to draw the program! XD It's quite a strange feeling to see Oware being solved, yet it is a very big tree to consider for a human! It is also clear by now that in other open-information games (chess above all) machines can just play better and beat the best human on earth (even though the game in not formally "solved" yet). So I guess for us poor human there is still a lot to work on! The game is still challenging and elegant, definitely one of my favourite unes and will remain there! And the Mancala family has so many different variants, so who knows??
Congratulations to Xavier who has been one our ardent supporters for over 15 years. We are happy to see Oware being brought to a crescendo in artificial intelligence. We will certainly have fun trying to beat the programme!
To read the full details of this achievement visit the blog and read the full article 'Oware Is Solved' If you Last week Xavier published end game scenarios for 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8,9 & 10 seeds left on the boards, This can be found on the research page - Playbook: Endgames. Let's study these and verify these scenarios.