Acknowledgement
- We humbly acknowledge that old games
are always better because inventing games is one of two human
activities excluded from progress. The other one is the brain
activity of people who hold that point of view.
- You can play here for free. The Arena is dedicated to high strategy only, and features a rating system.
A further selection of interesting games can be played in The Pit.
- We're more committed to strategy games than to tactical ones.
Here's the difference:
Strategy games have strategies varied enough to allow different
styles of play, tactics varied enough to induce their own
terminology, and a structure that allows advantageous sub-goals
to be achieved as calculable signposts along the
way.
Tactical games have strategies that are either fairly obvious (however deep),
like Pente, or fairly obscure, like Othello.
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- Games have a spirit - the ones of Chess and Draughts have been implemented in one form or another by almost every culture in the world.
- We're not entirely serious all the time, yet we may bring up that:
- Having thoughts is not the same as thinking.
- Opinions are difficult because they're too damn easy.
- José Raúl Capablanca and Bobby Fischer were great players, not great inventors.
- Draughts players are hooked on opposition - they'll oppose anything.
- To make a small fortune with abstract games, start with a big one.
- Life is fundamentally futile and great games are a tribute to precisely that.
- Defining the Abstract - a leading article by J. Mark Thompson.
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We want to shed some darkness on the matter of programmability by asking the following questions:
- Why is Havannah so hard to program?
In 2012 Christian Freeling will play ten games against the world's strongest programs and must win all ten to win a challenge he made in 2002. These programs all use the Monte Carlo method of evaluation, a method that 'came to the rescue' in terms of the programmers' willingness to accept the challenge in the first place.
See also: Playing and Solving Havannah, an MSc thesis presentation by Timo Ewalds, M.Sc. Student, Department of Computing Science - University of Alberta.
- Would Symple be even harder to program?
Symple is in our view the next major challenge for the Monte Carlo method, courtesy of its simplicity, its innovative move protocol and its rigid logic. We may soon have a test for that: Symple has been selected as the featured game for the 2013 CodeCup Challenge.
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Upcoming / running events |
- 2012 Chess World Championship
The World Chess Championship 2012 will be between the current world champion Viswanathan Anand of India and Boris Gelfand of Israel, winner of the Candidates tournament. The match will take place from 10–31 May 2012 in Moscow.
- 16th MSO: August 18th-27th, 2012, University of London Union
The 2012 schedule of events for the Mind Sports Olympiad is available. There are some exciting new editions for this year, but it's also at least one event where Hexdame by now may be considered a traditional game :)
New! At Mindoku you can play turnbased against real opponents, solve sudokus or participate in tournaments. |
- In this section you will find a number of unique combinatorial puzzles in two classes, tilings and 3D.
All puzzles ©
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- Math: We've discovered the structure of the series of successively better approximations of the roots of natural numbers, and the inherent division of non-squares in two distinct classes: carréphylic and carréphobic numbers.
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- We're not democratic, but we welcome suggestions
and we do actually answer questions (sometimes).
- A note on gender: we use pronouns like 'he' or 'him'
to exclude awkward constructions rather than women.
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