| About Havannah |
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Connection is not a 'grand theme'. But Havannah is special because in playing it, humans do something they cannot evaluate in measurable terms! In resisting programmability, this simple game is as hard as a diamond. Apart from the sunny side, human superiority over the machine, this raises an interesting question. What exactly do humans do when they play this game? One thing is sure: they think. And that's still a human prerogative. The Zillions game machine, a program that can play hundreds of games, is very apt at chess variants and elimination games, but predictably it plays Havannah like a moron. This is no fault of this magnificent program and a specific havannah program wouldn't do much better. Ironically it is the absence of a lot of things that makes Havannah so easy to understand for humans and so hard for computers:
Goals are very easy to understand, but very hard to implement in a program. Threats to win in two or three moves could be noticed, but many are irrelevant in a strategic sense and Havannah is decided on a strategical level. Lately programs using the Monte Carlo method have made significant progress on small boards. Havannah is a pencil and paper game: it can be played with two distinct markers and a pen for move numbers. Completed games are implicitly their own notation. The inventor has in the summer 2002 put €1000.- prize money on a program that can beat him one out of ten games on a base-10 board within the next decade. Several serious attempts are underway (not so much money driven because good programmers earn that kind of money in two days) and one of them, based at Leipzig University in Germany, offers a server too. It actually offers a program against which you can play via the applet if you connect to port number 1964, 1965, 1966 ... (where the last digit gives the board size). Havannah was one of the entries at the 12th Advances in Computer Games Conference, held in Pamplona, Spain, May 11 - May 13, 2009. We expect several entries at the next Advances in Computer Games Conference to be held September 24 - October 2, 2010 in Kanazawa, Japan. Preliminary information can be found here and here. Note: On friday the 13th of november 2009 "the long night of the Sciences" has taken place in Jena, Germany. One of the events was a "human versus computer" havannah tournament (base-6) in which two top ranking players, Mirko Rahn from Germany and Ed van Zon from the Netherlands, competed against two of the most advanced havannah programs, "Deep Fork" (formerly 'Tobrt') by Thomas Reinhardt from Germany and "Gambler" by dutch programmer Richard Pijl. Here are the games of the event and a report with photos, created by Ingo Althöfer of the complete event (scroll down a it for the Havannah part). We can report that Ed van Zon won the tournament, and that neither program has succeeded in beating a human player. Havannah © This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Java applet © This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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