• Othello is a two person board game based on the ancient games of Go and Reversi, which was for some ungodly reason named after one of Shakespeare's classic tragedies.
• It is played on an 8x8 board with two sided discs. The game begins with four center pieces already on the board, with black to move first.
• To move, a player must place a disc on the board so that one or more of the opponent's discs is trapped at each end by a disc of the player's color.
• All of the opponent's trapped discs subsequently flip and become the player's discs. One disk may trap the opponent's pieces in more than one direction, diagonals included, and can thus cause multiple rows to flip. However, discs do not flip when they become indirectly trapped by flipped disks.
• If one player cannot move, his/her turn is forfeited, but a player cannot pass if a move exists.
• The game ends when neither player can move or more frequently, when the board is full. The player with the most discs wins :).

My goal was to write a program that would allow you to play Othello with the computer, which is supposed to be a "smart" player. It works by creating a tree of linked lists containing possible moves. The first layer has all the moves the computer can currently make, the next has all the moves the opponent can make if the computer made each of the previous moves, etc. The cutoff depth for the tree is currently 5 layers, after which each board position is evaluated. The evaluation is based on number of available moves, frontier disks, stable disks, and number of disks. After the leaf nodes are evaluated, a minimax search of the tree is used to pick the best move.

play my game

(Enter moves using the grid coordinates "row, column". The comma is VERY important. Do not forget the comma :))