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About Havannah
Connection is not a 'grand theme' - it serves as a sub-goal in the larger context of territory, in games like Go or Dominions. 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 practical side, human superiority, this raises an interesting question. What exactly do humans do when they play this game? One thing is sure: they think. So, Computer Associates, if you've developped software that can do just that, prove it. As long as this simple little nut cannot be cracked, your claim would seem rather unsubstantial. Zillions' game machine, a program that can play many 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 - Computer Associates would do no better and neither would IBM's Deep Blue team. 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 that level: the program would be beaten long before it even had a clue about any threat. Havannah is a strategy game, so much so, that some twenty players at the math center at the Twente university played some thousand games the first year, without reaching a full understanding of its strategic dilemma. A better introduction to its strategy than reading about it and looking at basic tactics, may be the story of how one player changed all that. 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 issue of Abstract Games, put € 1000.- prize money on a program that can beat him one out of ten games 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 nice server too.
Havannah ©
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