67 replies to this topic

[Christophero Sly]

shadow460, on Fri Dec 16, 2005 1:09 AM, said:

Yeah, I'd like to know how a shutout is done.  I thought I could pull one, and I might, but I'm not convinced the computer plays fair.

I've gotten to the last six or so squares open, only for it to take four turns in a row more than once.
Tell me how that is fair!?

You might have to hit reset a few times until the computer falls for the trap, but the 13-piece shutout is simple. 19+ shutouts are much more difficult.

If you don't have a move, you lose your turn and the computer will make consecutive moves until you are able to make a move. It works both ways though. I've been able to make consecutive moves when the computer didn't have a move.

Edited by Christophero Sly, Fri Dec 16, 2005 2:09 AM.

[Christophero Sly]

Here is a 25-piece shutout.

Attached Thumbnails

• 

Edited by Christophero Sly, Fri Dec 16, 2005 2:03 AM.

[MoonlightKnight]

Christophero Sly, on Fri Dec 16, 2005 3:00 AM, said:

If you don't have a move, you lose your turn and the computer will make consecutive moves until you are able to make a move.  It works both ways though.  I've been able to make consecutive moves when the computer didn't have a move.

This is how I pulled off a 53... I had to get the computer to box itself in, basically LEAVE me the corners, and burn a couple 1 and two piece moves. I was able to take the last 4 empty boxes without the computer getting a turn. I shifted an almost tied game into a near whiteout that way. I don't expect a repeat any time soon...

Edited by MoonlightKnight, Fri Dec 16, 2005 2:31 AM.

[shadow460]

Christophero Sly, on Fri Dec 16, 2005 2:00 AM, said:

shadow460, on Fri Dec 16, 2005 1:09 AM, said:

Yeah, I'd like to know how a shutout is done.  I thought I could pull one, and I might, but I'm not convinced the computer plays fair.

I've gotten to the last six or so squares open, only for it to take four turns in a row more than once.
Tell me how that is fair!?

You might have to hit reset a few times until the computer falls for the trap, but the 13-piece shutout is simple. 19+ shutouts are much more difficult.

If you don't have a move, you lose your turn and the computer will make consecutive moves until you are able to make a move. It works both ways though. I've been able to make consecutive moves when the computer didn't have a move.

Yeah, that's not the game program's fault--it's part of the board game.

[Ze_ro]

Bad news guys... thanks to a power failure, I'm now getting hard drive errors under Linux... Some of you may remember that a hard drive crash is what ended season 2, and what's happening right now looks an awful lot like what happened last time. At the moment, although my computer is working enough to post this message, whatever damage the drive has sustained is preventing me from doing a lot of stuff (like fixing my video drivers and booting into X Windows), and I'm guessing that when I reboot to try to fix the damage, the drive will become completely inaccessible (This is what happened last time). I have no backup drive to replace this one at the moment, so I'd likely be down for AT LEAST a couple of days if not more, so if this is my last post for a while, then don't be too surprised.
I have backed up the data from season 3, so hopefully this won't cause a premature end this time... but just for the hell of it, I'm attaching the spreadsheet to this post. I use Gnumeric, so I'm not sure how well this file will work under Excel or OpenOffice.
This really sucks. Everyone please do me a favor and never, ever buy a Maxtor hard drive. This is the second time in 5 months that I've been burned by their drives, and their recovery tools are terrible.

--Zero

Attached Files

•  hsc3.zip   9.24K   68 downloads

[Christophero Sly]

One point improvement.

49

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[Christophero Sly]

55

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[shadow460]

Maxtor??
I wonder if it's the newer drives, then, 'cauee I have a coupld of old ones in this computer. I did have a short circuit inside the box, but I've got two other comps and several ways to copy what's on each of the hard drives.

I've always had the best performance from them, but I run a backup and a main drive, both Maxtors.

My worst performance has come from classic Quantum drives, and an IBM drive I've got.

The Diamond Max's have never failed at all. Then, too, I rarely ever have a hard drive problem.

Zero, when you get back, I'd like to know what happened since I rely heavily on these two Maxtor drives.

Fedora Core didn't run very well on my box, though. I use Winblows 98 SE--have used it since 1999.

Zero or whoever else can make the decision, if you need me to keep up with this HSC, PM me and I'll do it 'til you can get your comp running.

Edited by shadow460, Sat Dec 17, 2005 11:45 PM.

[silverpoodleman]

Best Game - 41 White/23 Black

Worst Game - 13 White/51 Black

[LarcenTyler]

Crappy score, just doing this for the participation point.

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[Omegamatrix]

That sucks Ze_ro. I hope your system comes back to life. I'm going to post my crappy score now cause I don't enjoy this game, and don't have the patience to do any better.



BTW Keilbaca pointed out in another thread that Tapper wasn't on the board in the HSC Forum. The link still exists under the HSC rules & info thread though.

Edited by Omegamatrix, Sun Dec 18, 2005 1:46 PM.

[MoonlightKnight]

shadow460, on Sun Dec 18, 2005 12:40 AM, said:

Maxtor??
I wonder if it's the newer drives, then, 'cauee I have a coupld of old ones in this computer.  I did have a short circuit inside the box, but I've got two other comps and several ways to copy what's on each of the hard drives.

I've always had the best performance from them, but I run a backup and a main drive, both Maxtors.

My worst performance has come from classic Quantum drives, and an IBM drive I've got.

The Diamond Max's have never failed at all.  Then, too, I rarely ever have a hard drive problem.

Zero, when you get back, I'd like to know what happened since I rely heavily on these two Maxtor drives.

Fedora Core didn't run very well on my box, though.  I use Winblows 98 SE--have used it since 1999.

Zero or whoever else can make the decision, if you need me to keep up with this HSC, PM me and I'll do it 'til you can get your comp running.

It's the brand... in general, Maxtor drives suck. I've heard numerous stories of these things just giving out from friends and on the internet... even had one die on me. I won't ever buy the brand again. I'll still to my Seagates and Western Digitals. never had a sigle issue with either of them. I love my 80GB Barracuda!

[Ze_ro]

shadow460, on Sun Dec 18, 2005 12:40 AM, said:

Zero, when you get back, I'd like to know what happened since I rely heavily on these two Maxtor drives.

Both drives that failed on me were DiamondMax SATA drives... one was 160GB and the most recent one was 200GB. Both died as a result of a power failure (How this killed the drive is something I still don't understand... but if you're relying on similar drives, then I recommend you get a UPS for the system).

The strange part is that I was able to reboot just fine. Since I hadn't rebooted in about 5 months, I took the time to compile the latest NVidia drivers... partway through the install, I started getting a bunch of ATA errors from the kernel and the install failed. At this point, I backed up whatever I felt was necessary (strangely enough, there were only about 5 files I felt it was worth backing up, as everything else was just junk I knew I could download again), and posted my previous post using Lynx. I tried running fsck on the drive, but all the ext3 tools kept telling me the superblock was wrecked, even when I had it try to read the backup superblocks.

I eventually managed to get the install to finish without errors, and got into X Windows, but eventually things failed enough that I was forced to reboot... at this point, GRUB wasn't even able to boot off the drive. I haven't really tried anything else, since so far this is exactly what happened with my previous DiamondMax drive, and I never managed to get very far with that one either. The frustrating part is that part of getting warranty service from Maxtor is running their "PowerMax" program to try to diagnose and repair the drive if possible. The problem here is that this software doesn't support most of the more popular SATA chipsets. Luckily, I found out that my brother has a friend with an older SATA board that IS supported, so I was able to get him to run their crappy software on the older drive to get a diagnostic code in order to authorize a return. Looks like I'll have to do the same for this newer one. Although I'm told I can actually call Maxtor and get them to issue an RMA without the code, I still think it sucks that their software can't work with my very common chipset.

I've cobbled together a replacement computer for the time being. It should be enough to keep up with HSC stuff, but it's very frustrating to use for various reasons (400MHz, 128MB ram, Win XP, etc...), so you probably won't see me online much until I can get a replacement from Maxtor.

--Zero

[shadow460]

I've got Ultra ATA drives. My computer's pretty dated, obviously. One's 15 GB and the other is 40GB. (91536U6 and 6EO40LO).

I used to live in a place where the power flashed every three hours or so. When I got my DVD Burner, I knew I couldn't have a power failure while burning a DVD, so I got a UPS then.

I've had a few restarts, short circuits, and outright power losses here and there, but the drives have lived.

This is off the wall, but have you checked the PSU? I had a computer fry four mainboards, one or two video cards, and a processor. No matter what I did, stuff fried, then the PSU finally gave up.
A faulty power supply is, IMO, a much more serious threat to your PC than even the CPU cooler dying or a drive failure.

I don't wanna derail the HSC, though. I'll start a thread in the Computers forum over this.

[Christophero Sly]

Here is a website with a short introduction to Othello strategy.

http://www.radagast....p/strategy.html

I assume that most of the strategy discussed is geared toward human vs. human games, so some of the strategy wasn't entirely applicable when playing against the VCS because the VCS places a high priority on capturing edge and corner pieces. However, I've found that the concept of mobility seems to be the key to winning big against the VCS. In the opening and through much of the mid-game, try to hold a minimum of squares, preferably squares close to the middle of the board. Capture some edge pieces when it makes sense, but don't build along the edges too much. Let the VCS capture most of the board. At some point, the VCS's mobility will be severely limited and it will have to start sacrificing it's holdings along the edges to you. Played just right, the VCS will become so limited in it's choice of moves that you can make 3 or more consecutive moves and win all four corners and the edges without the VCS being able to move.

I'm impressed that the programmer(s) were able to track 64 game pieces and implement some fairly good game logic in just 128 bytes.

Here is a photo that shows the sequence necessary to make a nine-move shutout.

Attached Thumbnails

• 

Edited by Christophero Sly, Mon Dec 19, 2005 12:13 PM.

[silverpoodleman]

UPDATE - 43!

[shadow460]

Probably my best run for this week...
42-22

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[Ze_ro]

Well, that's the end of this week's edition of the High Score Club! Congratulations to everyone on outsmarting the computer, and I hope you enjoyed Othello! Join us again next time when we'll be reading bits and taking names!

--Zero