Othello
Othello |
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-GENERAL OPTIONS-
These are selected by pressing the 'O' key. The little section on the
right that is normally reserved to display the moves will now display the
options. You can scroll through the options by pressing the up or down
arrow keys and pressing ENTER when the option you want is highlighted in
the centre. The options in the order they appear are as follows:
-REPLAY GAME-
This option will replay all the moves in the current game from the start
position to the last move played.
-RETURN TO GAME-
This takes you back to the current game after using the options.
-NEW GAME-
Will set up a new game at move one
-CANCEL OPENINGS-
The computer has a selection of opening moves built into the database,
this allows the computer to play the opening moves very quickly no matter
what level the computer is set at, by selecting this option you stop the
computer from using its 'Book' and force it to calculate each move. This
option will only be effective for the current game.
-RESIGN-
Will terminate the current game and set up a new game at move one.
-TAKE BACK-
his option allows you to take back the last move played, you can take
back all the moves if you wish from your current position right back to
the start of the game.
-GO FORWARDS-
This is the reverse of the Take Back option, from any previous position
you can move forwards through the move list one move at a time.
-CHANGE SIDES-
Using this option will allow you to play as white, or change back to
black if you are already playing as white. You can change sides at any
time during the game when it is your move.
-SET UP-
This allows you to set up any board position and to play from that
position, the options within the setup routine will be displayed in the
little window on the right.
-CHANGE LEVEL
There are 5 playing levels built into this version of Othello, these are
as follows:
Level 1: is a simple material only evaluation routine, it is so
weak that even beginners should mostly be able to beat it.
Level 2: at this level the program uses both basic static
positional and material routines.
Level 3: uses a dynamically changing positional routine, coupled
to the material routine, the program also does a Brute Force search one
ply into the future.
Level 4: This is basically the same as level 3 except the brute
force 'look ahead' is deeper
Level 5: The same as level 3 and 4, but again with an even deeper
ply search than level 4.
There are two other options that are available all the time without using the options menu, these are:
'MOVE NOW' option
Pressing the 'Move Now' key will force the computer to make the best move
found so far from its current search. On the first 3 levels this will be
quite quick, but because this key is only checked at certain stages within
the positional routines, when used on the slower playing levels (4 and 5),
may require that the key is held down until the search reaches the point
in the routine that checks if it is being pressed.
-HINT-
Pressing the 'Hint' key during the players turn will force the computer
to do a level 2 search on the position and display the best move it thinks
you can play.
The computer will never play an illegal move, nor will it ever allow its opponent to make an illegal move, should you make an illegal move the computer will make the appropriate noise and display 'ILLEGAL' on the recorded moves window.
If a player cannot make a legal move, the computer will recognise this and instead of a move being displayed on the recorded moves window... i.e., A8, H4, C6 or such like, it will record the move as _0 then the other player moves again if they can. If neither player has a legal move but there are still empty squares on the board, the computer will terminate the game at that point and display the winner as normal.
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