A recent XKCD comic charted the difficulty of various games for computers, from
Tic Tac Toe and
Nim being solved for all positions, to computers mastering the physical game of
Beirut and mental game of
chess (
the 2006 Deep Fritz vs Vladimir Kramnikin games, previously). There are other games that are basic on the face, but whose potentials for move combinations is so vast as to be beyond the scope of computers.
Marion Tinsley was the last great human checkers player, matching off against
Chinook in the last 6 games of his life, each ending in a draw (
previously).
Checkers was finally solved in 2007 (Google quickview;
original PDF), and is largest game that has been solved to date, at 8x8.
Solving Othello might be possible, if the decision tree were truncated, as
the 10x10 board game tree complexity is very huge.
The 19x19 Go board is is often noted as one of the primary reasons why a strong program is hard to create, though
some programs are
getting better at
optimizing move evaluations. More:
computerized gaming solutions previously, and
the Wikipedia page for solved games.
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 11, 2012 -
57 comments
Over 140,000 people participated in the xkcd Color Survey, naming various colors and
the results are in. Among other cool things, you can see a
nice map of RGB colors to color names and see the
most commonly identified 954 color names. The webcomic is
not the first institution to survey people about color choices and
present pretty results. At the heart of color naming is a deeper debate about language,
whether colors are universal, and
how words shape perception. One
highly influential view suggests that there are 11 universal basic colors, though the number of colors identified in native tongues
varies across the world, but even
the English origins of color words are complex. Perhaps you should
test your own color perception, or just see
a huge chart of color names in different languages.
[also, prev.]
posted by blahblahblah
on May 4, 2010 -
42 comments
Geohashing:
"As you may have noticed, today’s
comic contains an algorithm for converting dates into local coordinates. For a given day, you can calculate what that day’s coordinate is for your region. Dan has put together a
tool for calculating a day’s coordinates and show it using Google Maps."
[more inside]
posted by Anything
on May 21, 2008 -
29 comments
A month ago Randall Munroe of XKCD drew a
comic lamenting the internet's lack of pictures of women playing electric guitar in the shower. He registered
wetriffs.com and soon the submissions started pouring in. The
gallery is now up.
[nsfw]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 10, 2007 -
85 comments
