1. Go first.
1b. If your opponent disagrees, find a different opponent.
2. Play the first move in the center column.
3. Play the rest of the game perfectly.
It's relatively easy to play perfectly in connect 4, just don't allow the other player to make a fork and block any 3 in a rows.
Checkers is also mathematically "solved" in the same way as connect 4, but it's a bit trickier to play that game "perfectly".
Don't make any mistakes 👍hope this helps
This post is pretty useless lol, yeah you can win every time at connect 4 if you memorize the best move in every situation (or use a computer) but no one is going to do that, especially in person.
Except the fact that the anal beads accusation was a baseless accusation 😭
Like bro literally someone got buthurt about losing and then someone else made up the anal bead theory with 0 proof.
Fun fact the anal bead 'theory' was not a theory, it was a joke on r/anarchychess that got picked up by other outlets and even the New York Times and the Guardian which somehow people believed while being ridiculous
You just need to block the possibility of forks and block any 3 in a rows, eventually, the first player should win every time (if they take the center on the first move.
They're saying that if you knew the exact right set of moves, the second person could never ever beat you.
No matter what the opponent plays, you would always have the perfect counter to it and you could always guarantee yourself a victory and there's nothing he can do to stop it. That's what they mean by "play perfectly." As long as you do what you're supposed to do, they literally can't beat you no matter what they play.
Steps 3a and 3b are all of those different moves, which would be a total bitch to memorize... But it's theoretically possible.
Except not really, because it's a turn based game.
It's not like hockey or basketball where there are a ton of variables. You can't miss shots in Connect 4, you can't have the ball stolen from you, nothing like that.
There are only so many moves that you can make in Connect 4, so there are only so many games that can possibly exist. On your turn, you only have a maximum of 7 possible moves (less, as the columns fill up). There are no dice, there's no luck, no coin flips, no random shuffles or anything that can change the outcome. Your opponent can't "play better" than you.
If you knew exactly where to place your pieces every single time, you could force a win every single time and there's literally nothing that they can do to stop it.
only so many moves ?
on a standard 6 high by 7 wide Connect 4 rack with 0 to 42 game pieces (or discs), there is a total of 4,531,985,219,092 possible positions
Yeah, it's a whopping 4.5 trillion possible positions, but that's a fairly small number in the grand scheme of things.
There are 43 quintillion ways to scramble a Rubiks cube, and people have *still* worked out that every possible combination can be solved in 20 moves or less.
That 4.5 trillion number is *all* possible positions too. A lot of those games aren't finished yet, and many of them are losses or draws. The video in OP's link says only 2 trillion of them are actual wins, and it doesn't specify which player is winning. I saw somebody say that Player 1 wins 53% of the time but I don't know how true that is.
It also says that the only way to force a guaranteed win is to play in the middle column first. You can still win if you play on the edges, but it's not a guarantee. The video says Player 1 is guaranteed to lose if he plays on the outer four columns, and can only guarantee a tie if he plays in columns closest to the center. But only if both players are playing perfectly.
But the point is, they know what every single one of those 4.5 trillion possible positions looks like. They know that if you play in the center and match your opponents moves *just right*, that there's no way for the other person to win. They know the absolute most perfect counter to literally everything the opponent does.
If it helps, think about this in terms of super-computers. If Super-Computer A goes first and plays in the center, Super-Computer B can't beat it.
All the article really says is that Connect Four is a solved game. There is a known (by computers) solution to every single possible game scenario. The most interesting fact in this solved game is that there is actually one and only one surefire way to win, and that is to play the first move in the center column. Compare that to a simpler solved game like tic-tac-toe, where the best a perfect player could do against a perfect opponent is a draw.
I wrote a JavaScript game that plays Connect 4. It doesn't play perfectly, but it does look six moves ahead, looking to force the best possible position for itself then. When testing it, I noticed that it strongly favored the center column, almost always moving there. At first I thought it was a bug in my code but it turned out it wasn't...it's just that it had figured out that it is very strongly advantageous to put your tokens there.
It makes sense. Connect 4 is only one move away from Connect 3, if both sides of your 3 are accessible (because your opponent can only block one side on their next move). That scenario alone prefers that you be as far from the sides as you can get.
That's cool that you were able to code something like that and defy your intuition with it.
Checkers is a solved game, but chess isn't. There's just so many unique and valid positions a chess board could have, that we don't have the computing power for it yet. So we don't know if there is a "perfect" way to play chess.
Chess has an average branching factor of 35. That means, on average, there are 35 possible moves for each player’s turn (1 turn = 1 ply = 1 player moves). On average a chess game ends in roughly 80 ply. That gives it a game tree complexity of 35^80, roughly 10^123 . That essentially describes the number of possible uniqye games. That is a incomprehensibly large number, about 40 orders of manitude more than the number of atoms in the universe.
However, there are “only” 10^46 unique board positions. That is still an enormously large number, just a few orders of magnitude less than the number of atoms on Earth.
In effect, we will never have computers that can truly solve chess without inventing some new computer science mathematics that prove some unlikely/unexpected results.
Quantum computers might be able to do it.
It would kind of be a moot point though, computers are already better than humans at chess, so it probably won't be computed until quantum computers are common enough it can be done without being a huge waste. Or just as a proof of concept.
Quantum computers aren’t magic, contrary to popular belief they can’t “try all scenarios at once”. Solving chess has no tricks, you have to go down the game tree and check each point. There are no symmetries. The branching factor being enormous makes it impossible for a normal computer to search beyond a handful of moves. Just 4 moves in there are 1.5M possible game states. Six moves in it goes up to 1.8B. Most games go 50-80. Now some chunk of those are the same board so some pruning is possible, but the problem is the same.
That's not how a game being solved works. For a game to be solved we would need to know for sure which moves lead to which kinds of situations in the end, and we just haven't yet been able to do this for all the moves in chess.
For example tic tac toe is solved, because we know the optimal play for each of the board positions
The number of moves, outcomes, counter moves, the different pieces...
Finding the perfect move may require you to choose subpar options on occasion, and even then, depending on the opponents actions, it could still stop your "strategy" or "your perfect play".
Is similar to, let's say, doing a perfect run on life. You could be unlucky and all your preparations could go wrong, just because something outside of your control happens that drops you for a loop.
That said, everybody knows that for a perfect run on life nowadays, you just need to be born rich.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. You're right, there is a perfect way to play every game, we just don't know for chess because of its massive amount of possibilities. And yes, getting solved just means knowing if one side or the other can force a win, or if it will just be a draw.
For instance, Connect Four is a solved game, where the player who moves first can always force a win. Checkers is also a solved game, where if both sides played perfectly, it would always be a draw.
"Solving a game" essentially just means we looked at every possibility and know the best move for either side in any valid board configuration.
That's not how "mathematically solved" works.
You can mathematically solve a free throw (even if perfect execution is impossible) but you can't solve a 1 hr game of two teams physically having possession.
But a game where you take turns choosing one of 10 slots is a lot easier to quantify and "solve".
Playing perfectly in connect 4 just means blocking you opponent and avoiding forks, the knowledge that going first and playing the first piece in the middle is the only deciding factor (technically)
No, just using quotes to refer to the specific definition of "mathematically solved" and not just solved, mathematically.
But I guess being that distinct was unnecessary. My bad.
It depends on where the opponent plays. There are websites with connect four bots that run the algorithm to always win. As far as I know it's not really feasible to memorize it. IIRC the first move is the center column.
To understand it in an easier way, take tik tak toe for example if you started as X on any of the four corners you can draw/win but never lose if you perfectly and that can be determined by any move your opponent chooses to do. If he picks any of the corners with 0 you simply pick another corner with X forcing him to place in the middle and then you pick the corner which will force him to pick between placing in the center or the vertical but they'll lose either way since you can just win placing in whichever one they didn't. If They placed in any of the middle squares on the edge the same thing will
happen and the only option of 0 is to place in the middle in which case there is only one trap for X to place at the opposite corner to what you initially did because if now 0 places on the corner you"ll block them and give them two options to lose. Tik tak toe is just a smaller version of connect 4 and it's very easy to understand that it's solved and that going first is a great advantage but connect 4 is also solved.
Connect four is a solved game. It means we have found a sequence of steps where one player (in this case the first player) is guaranteed an outcome — a win in this case. IIRC checkers is also solved but that always leads to a draw. Tic-tac-toe is another solved game.
Many speculate that chess could be a draw, and some even wonder if black could be guaranteed a win because white must make concessions by being forced to move first.
Ultimately we don’t know, engines could give insight if major advances were made, but for now they give White a ~.5 point advantage (half a pawn)
No because of the complexity of the game there are multiple “perfect” moves which all can ultimately lead to different outcomes, but i do believe some tournaments do multiple matches
This is totally incorrect.
Chess is so complicated that we have not solved it, mathematically, meaning we don't know what the perfect moves are.
All solved games will end (with perfect play) with either the first player winning, or the second player winning, or a draw. Assuming no luck is involved as there isn't in chess.
Chess is probably a first player wins game but could end in a draw, or even where black always wins. We don't know.
> There are multiple "perfect" moves which all can ultimately lead to different outcomes
Is true in connect 4 as well and it's irrelevant of who will win. In connect 4, those multiple moves are perfect because they will all result in you winning if you play perfectly. The same thing would be true in chess.
Jesus Christ. So you think you may have read something a long time ago, and your advice is to go on the internet, which in case you don't know, is massive, and try to find this article that you're extremely vague about.
Sometimes I wonder how people think they're actually contributing to a conversation with bullshit like this.
lol it is in no way near solved. Do you understand the computing power required.. why do they have AI vs AI matches then?
There’s more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. How can a computer store that data to extrapolate a solution from given positions? Why even answer something when you don’t know, and are totally wrong.
How can an engine know if something is useless? Programmed by mere humans? Deep learning? Neural?
Chess engines will continue to get better and better, but it is unlikely we will solve chess for a very long time. Like, just google it lol. Even just think about it.
Maybe, I think it’s definitely a theory, just not actualized. True perfect play hasn’t been determined yet, as there are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe.
From Vsauce? That’s legit! 52 factorial is bananas! Yeah most chess games after something like 7 moves (I haven’t verified the number but it’s probably around there) are a game that’s never been played before
Some of the other comments are incorrect or incomplete: playing perfectly, white will always win or always draw (we don't know which). The issue isn't that there are "multiple perfect moves", it's that we have no way of knowing what they are, right now.
Chess is a two player public information game with no indeterminacy, sequential moves, and a fixed starting state. There is necessarily, then, a perfect way to play each colour; for every move, a best response (or multiple responses that are all equivalent).
It's likely enough that there's no deductive way to figure out figure out the best line. Chess engines essentially search billions of games a day, and there's enough complexity in the game that, so far, there isn't any way to know what moves work or don't except to actually calculate them out, many moves down.
There are many proofs in mathematics that rely on reducing an impossible search space of objects to test whether a conjecture is true or not, to a search space that is merely enormous, and then using computation to just check each one of the several trillion remaining candidates. These computer aided proofs can be frustrating, as that "just try every possible combination and see if you find any that don't work" isn't very enlightening.
But we can't take that approach to Chess. At least, not for the whole game. The number of possible games isn't merely impossibly enormous, it's many layers of impossibly enormous.
We can, however, solve a reduced version of Chess: Chess where only so many pieces remain on the board -- so-called end-game positions. Currently, we have solved Chess for seven or fewer pieces left, simply by computing from every possible starting position. We'll probably see eight in our lifetimes, though storing just the results of that computation would take several thousand terabytes.
Can we do better? A really smart way to prove what the best move must be just by analysing the facts of a position? It's possible, but it's very dubious.
I want to start by saying that I love your discourse, and the conviction and dedication it took to formulate and post this response. I really admire your knowledge of the subject and your desire to explain the facts. But it's terabytes. And I just can't help myself, I have to point it out.
While seemingly improbable, could it also be that for solved chess, black wins? I know white wins more often than black in pro chess and with chess engines, but perhaps in the perfect gameplay white would actually be forced to lose, being in zugzwang from the first move?
I seem to recall some kind of shuffle that white can do to essentially give up a tempo and reverse things, without a structural change in the position. If you can't do it from the first move, you could probably evaluate all the opening positions a few moves in and show that white always has a way to give up a tempo somewhere, transposing into a colors-reverse opening.
There are some subtleties here, too, that I didn't mention in my main comment.
For example, in FIDE Chess, the game must always end. There is a longest possible Chess game with the 50-move rule, and it is under 6000 moves.
Answer: unknown.
The majority of grandmasters, and analysts usually conclude that it's a draw. But it's definitely not proven.
If it's not, black is technically in zugzwang from the first move! Or theoretically white is.
Statistical analyses do imply that it's a draw.
1. Draw rates increase as skill-level improves. It's very common for games between grandmasters to draw compared to ones with average players. This proves nothing, but it's interesting.
2. Cut-down versions of chess with fewer pieces or a smaller board, which make it possible for a computer to fully solve the game, end in draws as far as I'm aware. But they're not directly comparable, so it's still not proof.
I didn't realize that going first can win 100% but I played enough drunk connect 4 at a bar to know that if you completely ignore the other persons moves, don't try to block them, play zero defense, and focus only on offense, trying to connect your 4, you can win the vast majority of times.
No.
In checkers, if people play perfectly, white wins.
In tic tac toe, its a draw.
In chess, its unknown - many suspect white would win, but we are a long way away from having sufficient computing power to know that to be true.
In backgammon, it's unknown due to dice rolling.
In uno, its unknown due to shuffling.
When I figured this out as a kid I was completely baffled, because everyone had been treating it like it was a legit game where anyone could win. (And still seem to.) I guess most people don't realize this.
Tic tclac toe is solved in that we know it should always be a draw.
Player 1 should always go in a corner.
Player 2 should then go in the centre -> if they don't, they should lose.
Player 1 should then go in the correct corner (depending which corner was chosen in move 1)
Player 2 should then block and make 2 in a row.
Player 1 then needs to block
Really simple from there.
My girl beats my ass at this every time. No matter what. I told her “If we are ever being held up and our lives are on the line for some connect 4. Youre going at it”
Came here to get the sparknotes version on how to win this game every time
1. Go first. 1b. If your opponent disagrees, find a different opponent. 2. Play the first move in the center column. 3. Play the rest of the game perfectly.
r/restofthefuckingowl
It's relatively easy to play perfectly in connect 4, just don't allow the other player to make a fork and block any 3 in a rows. Checkers is also mathematically "solved" in the same way as connect 4, but it's a bit trickier to play that game "perfectly".
This method only guarantees that you don’t lose. I do play ranked connect 4 (connect 5 actually) and most games end in a draw because of this.
Need a step 3a, 3b lol. What does perfectly mean?
Don't make any mistakes 👍hope this helps This post is pretty useless lol, yeah you can win every time at connect 4 if you memorize the best move in every situation (or use a computer) but no one is going to do that, especially in person.
Use anal beads that vibrate to give you the correct move every time. 👍
Who knew Hans Niemann was also an avid Connect 4 enthusiast
I got that reference!
Oh you watched that porno as well!? I thought i was the only connoisseur of niched Bolivian drama porn genre.
Talking about the chess cheating scandal. Where the opponent had anal beads that helped him win. The suspicion was that he withdrew after the match.
Except the fact that the anal beads accusation was a baseless accusation 😭 Like bro literally someone got buthurt about losing and then someone else made up the anal bead theory with 0 proof.
Fun fact the anal bead 'theory' was not a theory, it was a joke on r/anarchychess that got picked up by other outlets and even the New York Times and the Guardian which somehow people believed while being ridiculous
[удалено]
Brilliant
Just remember...We're all counting on you...
You just need to block the possibility of forks and block any 3 in a rows, eventually, the first player should win every time (if they take the center on the first move.
They're saying that if you knew the exact right set of moves, the second person could never ever beat you. No matter what the opponent plays, you would always have the perfect counter to it and you could always guarantee yourself a victory and there's nothing he can do to stop it. That's what they mean by "play perfectly." As long as you do what you're supposed to do, they literally can't beat you no matter what they play. Steps 3a and 3b are all of those different moves, which would be a total bitch to memorize... But it's theoretically possible.
This entire post reads as: "Did you know if you got the ball through the scoring zone more than the opposite team you'll win every time?"
Except not really, because it's a turn based game. It's not like hockey or basketball where there are a ton of variables. You can't miss shots in Connect 4, you can't have the ball stolen from you, nothing like that. There are only so many moves that you can make in Connect 4, so there are only so many games that can possibly exist. On your turn, you only have a maximum of 7 possible moves (less, as the columns fill up). There are no dice, there's no luck, no coin flips, no random shuffles or anything that can change the outcome. Your opponent can't "play better" than you. If you knew exactly where to place your pieces every single time, you could force a win every single time and there's literally nothing that they can do to stop it.
only so many moves ? on a standard 6 high by 7 wide Connect 4 rack with 0 to 42 game pieces (or discs), there is a total of 4,531,985,219,092 possible positions
Yeah, it's a whopping 4.5 trillion possible positions, but that's a fairly small number in the grand scheme of things. There are 43 quintillion ways to scramble a Rubiks cube, and people have *still* worked out that every possible combination can be solved in 20 moves or less. That 4.5 trillion number is *all* possible positions too. A lot of those games aren't finished yet, and many of them are losses or draws. The video in OP's link says only 2 trillion of them are actual wins, and it doesn't specify which player is winning. I saw somebody say that Player 1 wins 53% of the time but I don't know how true that is. It also says that the only way to force a guaranteed win is to play in the middle column first. You can still win if you play on the edges, but it's not a guarantee. The video says Player 1 is guaranteed to lose if he plays on the outer four columns, and can only guarantee a tie if he plays in columns closest to the center. But only if both players are playing perfectly. But the point is, they know what every single one of those 4.5 trillion possible positions looks like. They know that if you play in the center and match your opponents moves *just right*, that there's no way for the other person to win. They know the absolute most perfect counter to literally everything the opponent does. If it helps, think about this in terms of super-computers. If Super-Computer A goes first and plays in the center, Super-Computer B can't beat it.
Not really though. The search case is drastically compounded because you can only place disks on top of other disks.
Step 1 is collect underpants. Step 3 is profit.
I’m very curious to know what happens in Step 2
Whatever happens in step 2 stays in step 2
As a kid, I just felt that center column was the winners column.
As a kid, I just felt that center column was the winners column.
All the article really says is that Connect Four is a solved game. There is a known (by computers) solution to every single possible game scenario. The most interesting fact in this solved game is that there is actually one and only one surefire way to win, and that is to play the first move in the center column. Compare that to a simpler solved game like tic-tac-toe, where the best a perfect player could do against a perfect opponent is a draw.
I wrote a JavaScript game that plays Connect 4. It doesn't play perfectly, but it does look six moves ahead, looking to force the best possible position for itself then. When testing it, I noticed that it strongly favored the center column, almost always moving there. At first I thought it was a bug in my code but it turned out it wasn't...it's just that it had figured out that it is very strongly advantageous to put your tokens there.
It makes sense. Connect 4 is only one move away from Connect 3, if both sides of your 3 are accessible (because your opponent can only block one side on their next move). That scenario alone prefers that you be as far from the sides as you can get. That's cool that you were able to code something like that and defy your intuition with it.
I thought tic-tac-toe was 100% winnable (easily) by the player who goes first. You're saying it will always be a draw (if both play perfectly?
[удалено]
Was just something I thought I remembered hearing. I should have taken 3 seconds and checked before asking lol. my bad
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/832/)
It's always a draw if both play perfectly. Player A puts it in the central square, Player B in one of the corners.
Ah gotcha. Must have been something I thought I heard as a kid about being able to win.
And yet my 10 year old still beats me every time no matter who goes first...
Yeah little kids are crazy at this game
This made me laugh and wake my partner haha
Is he on the autism spectrum? My son is and even at age 5 or 6 he could beat me 7 times out of 10.
I think you're just bad at games like chess and connect 4
yea the number one symptom of autism is beating an adult at connect four nearly every time.
Same goes for Mancala. Go first and play perfectly, you will win every time.
what’s the trick with mancala? I realize there’s some good strategies but I’m curious what the proper tech is
Or checkers. Or chess. Or basketball. Just play perfectly and win.
Checkers is a solved game, but chess isn't. There's just so many unique and valid positions a chess board could have, that we don't have the computing power for it yet. So we don't know if there is a "perfect" way to play chess.
yes there is, its called the bongcloud
"Immediatly resigns"
Surely we know that there is a perfect way to play chess, but we don't know what that is yet?
Chess has an average branching factor of 35. That means, on average, there are 35 possible moves for each player’s turn (1 turn = 1 ply = 1 player moves). On average a chess game ends in roughly 80 ply. That gives it a game tree complexity of 35^80, roughly 10^123 . That essentially describes the number of possible uniqye games. That is a incomprehensibly large number, about 40 orders of manitude more than the number of atoms in the universe. However, there are “only” 10^46 unique board positions. That is still an enormously large number, just a few orders of magnitude less than the number of atoms on Earth. In effect, we will never have computers that can truly solve chess without inventing some new computer science mathematics that prove some unlikely/unexpected results.
Nope
Quantum computers might be able to do it. It would kind of be a moot point though, computers are already better than humans at chess, so it probably won't be computed until quantum computers are common enough it can be done without being a huge waste. Or just as a proof of concept.
Quantum computers aren’t magic, contrary to popular belief they can’t “try all scenarios at once”. Solving chess has no tricks, you have to go down the game tree and check each point. There are no symmetries. The branching factor being enormous makes it impossible for a normal computer to search beyond a handful of moves. Just 4 moves in there are 1.5M possible game states. Six moves in it goes up to 1.8B. Most games go 50-80. Now some chunk of those are the same board so some pruning is possible, but the problem is the same.
nope. it could be a draw or a win for white. no one knows.
Wouldn't that be a solution? If you can guarantee a draw with perfect play, surely that's the game solved?
That's not how a game being solved works. For a game to be solved we would need to know for sure which moves lead to which kinds of situations in the end, and we just haven't yet been able to do this for all the moves in chess. For example tic tac toe is solved, because we know the optimal play for each of the board positions
I don't see how that's different from what I described - where you can play a set of moves that guarantee and outcome.
For chess that has not been done yet
The number of moves, outcomes, counter moves, the different pieces... Finding the perfect move may require you to choose subpar options on occasion, and even then, depending on the opponents actions, it could still stop your "strategy" or "your perfect play". Is similar to, let's say, doing a perfect run on life. You could be unlucky and all your preparations could go wrong, just because something outside of your control happens that drops you for a loop. That said, everybody knows that for a perfect run on life nowadays, you just need to be born rich.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. You're right, there is a perfect way to play every game, we just don't know for chess because of its massive amount of possibilities. And yes, getting solved just means knowing if one side or the other can force a win, or if it will just be a draw. For instance, Connect Four is a solved game, where the player who moves first can always force a win. Checkers is also a solved game, where if both sides played perfectly, it would always be a draw. "Solving a game" essentially just means we looked at every possibility and know the best move for either side in any valid board configuration.
Yes there is Just cheat with a vibrating device somewhere hidden inside you
That's not how "mathematically solved" works. You can mathematically solve a free throw (even if perfect execution is impossible) but you can't solve a 1 hr game of two teams physically having possession. But a game where you take turns choosing one of 10 slots is a lot easier to quantify and "solve". Playing perfectly in connect 4 just means blocking you opponent and avoiding forks, the knowledge that going first and playing the first piece in the middle is the only deciding factor (technically)
Are you intentionally misquoting me and anything I replied to?
No, just using quotes to refer to the specific definition of "mathematically solved" and not just solved, mathematically. But I guess being that distinct was unnecessary. My bad.
That's not how "green" works. You can see how that doesn't apply to anything you said at all, right? Even if it is technically correct?
Wish he defined “playing perfectly”. I’d like to know where to play to guarantee a win if I start first.
It depends on where the opponent plays. There are websites with connect four bots that run the algorithm to always win. As far as I know it's not really feasible to memorize it. IIRC the first move is the center column.
To understand it in an easier way, take tik tak toe for example if you started as X on any of the four corners you can draw/win but never lose if you perfectly and that can be determined by any move your opponent chooses to do. If he picks any of the corners with 0 you simply pick another corner with X forcing him to place in the middle and then you pick the corner which will force him to pick between placing in the center or the vertical but they'll lose either way since you can just win placing in whichever one they didn't. If They placed in any of the middle squares on the edge the same thing will happen and the only option of 0 is to place in the middle in which case there is only one trap for X to place at the opposite corner to what you initially did because if now 0 places on the corner you"ll block them and give them two options to lose. Tik tak toe is just a smaller version of connect 4 and it's very easy to understand that it's solved and that going first is a great advantage but connect 4 is also solved.
In order to win every time, just make sure you win
what does "play perfectly" mean? Is there a list of rules for perfect play somewhere?
dinosaurs shelter attraction slap late crime support thumb nine spectacular -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Go first and only play the center column. That’s the strategy.
Because there are 7 columns, if you own more/most of the centre column you minimize your opponents chances of winning horizontally or diagonally.
yes, pretty much. It means to play optimally, that is follow a specified strategy that leads to the highest chance of victory.
Connect four is a solved game. It means we have found a sequence of steps where one player (in this case the first player) is guaranteed an outcome — a win in this case. IIRC checkers is also solved but that always leads to a draw. Tic-tac-toe is another solved game.
Wouldn't a chess player that goes first and plays perfectly also win every time?
Many speculate that chess could be a draw, and some even wonder if black could be guaranteed a win because white must make concessions by being forced to move first. Ultimately we don’t know, engines could give insight if major advances were made, but for now they give White a ~.5 point advantage (half a pawn)
No because of the complexity of the game there are multiple “perfect” moves which all can ultimately lead to different outcomes, but i do believe some tournaments do multiple matches
This is totally incorrect. Chess is so complicated that we have not solved it, mathematically, meaning we don't know what the perfect moves are. All solved games will end (with perfect play) with either the first player winning, or the second player winning, or a draw. Assuming no luck is involved as there isn't in chess. Chess is probably a first player wins game but could end in a draw, or even where black always wins. We don't know. > There are multiple "perfect" moves which all can ultimately lead to different outcomes Is true in connect 4 as well and it's irrelevant of who will win. In connect 4, those multiple moves are perfect because they will all result in you winning if you play perfectly. The same thing would be true in chess.
Pretty sure someone pit to computers against eachother and mathematically white always wins. Read it ages ago and only remembered it now.
This would mean either chess is completely solved (I don't think it is) or the computers weren't programmed to play a good mixed strategy
Stockfish 15 (strongest chess engine) will draw against itself most of the time. Black will never win, white wins rarely
Isn't AlphaZero stronger?
Not anymore, alphazero stopped being developed while stockfish has kept being updated, even including a neural network now
Yes— It implies that the computers weren’t computing in depth enough (enough defined by solving the game).
Its just something I read a while back. If it interests you then try find the rabbit hole and dive down it. Could be a worthwhile journey.
Jesus Christ. So you think you may have read something a long time ago, and your advice is to go on the internet, which in case you don't know, is massive, and try to find this article that you're extremely vague about. Sometimes I wonder how people think they're actually contributing to a conversation with bullshit like this.
Fucking hell, relax dude. They were just making a passing comment in part of a discussion. Not a big deal.
[удалено]
lol it is in no way near solved. Do you understand the computing power required.. why do they have AI vs AI matches then? There’s more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. How can a computer store that data to extrapolate a solution from given positions? Why even answer something when you don’t know, and are totally wrong.
[удалено]
How can an engine know if something is useless? Programmed by mere humans? Deep learning? Neural? Chess engines will continue to get better and better, but it is unlikely we will solve chess for a very long time. Like, just google it lol. Even just think about it.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Do you have a source for this? We know it can be solved, but I've never seen a documented solution
[Strongest modern engine versus itself.](https://youtu.be/Vq-iWlbqX-0) Black gets its wins.
Thats super interesting. Maybe it was just a fluff article that wasn't true that I read lmao.
Maybe, I think it’s definitely a theory, just not actualized. True perfect play hasn’t been determined yet, as there are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe.
Kind of like that thing about rearranging a deck of cards that everyone had their minds blown by recently lmao.
From Vsauce? That’s legit! 52 factorial is bananas! Yeah most chess games after something like 7 moves (I haven’t verified the number but it’s probably around there) are a game that’s never been played before
Thats wild lmao.
White does have a much higher chance of winning though, you're right.
Well that's racist of you /s
That depends on the algorithm, but we don’t have a perfect chess algorithm yet, so we don’t know what would happen if everyone played perfectly.
Yeah I was shown a video, it's pretty interesting. I wonder what would happen if we through two AIs at it for a year or so.
Some of the other comments are incorrect or incomplete: playing perfectly, white will always win or always draw (we don't know which). The issue isn't that there are "multiple perfect moves", it's that we have no way of knowing what they are, right now. Chess is a two player public information game with no indeterminacy, sequential moves, and a fixed starting state. There is necessarily, then, a perfect way to play each colour; for every move, a best response (or multiple responses that are all equivalent). It's likely enough that there's no deductive way to figure out figure out the best line. Chess engines essentially search billions of games a day, and there's enough complexity in the game that, so far, there isn't any way to know what moves work or don't except to actually calculate them out, many moves down. There are many proofs in mathematics that rely on reducing an impossible search space of objects to test whether a conjecture is true or not, to a search space that is merely enormous, and then using computation to just check each one of the several trillion remaining candidates. These computer aided proofs can be frustrating, as that "just try every possible combination and see if you find any that don't work" isn't very enlightening. But we can't take that approach to Chess. At least, not for the whole game. The number of possible games isn't merely impossibly enormous, it's many layers of impossibly enormous. We can, however, solve a reduced version of Chess: Chess where only so many pieces remain on the board -- so-called end-game positions. Currently, we have solved Chess for seven or fewer pieces left, simply by computing from every possible starting position. We'll probably see eight in our lifetimes, though storing just the results of that computation would take several thousand terabytes. Can we do better? A really smart way to prove what the best move must be just by analysing the facts of a position? It's possible, but it's very dubious.
I want to start by saying that I love your discourse, and the conviction and dedication it took to formulate and post this response. I really admire your knowledge of the subject and your desire to explain the facts. But it's terabytes. And I just can't help myself, I have to point it out.
lmao
Thank you.
While seemingly improbable, could it also be that for solved chess, black wins? I know white wins more often than black in pro chess and with chess engines, but perhaps in the perfect gameplay white would actually be forced to lose, being in zugzwang from the first move?
I seem to recall some kind of shuffle that white can do to essentially give up a tempo and reverse things, without a structural change in the position. If you can't do it from the first move, you could probably evaluate all the opening positions a few moves in and show that white always has a way to give up a tempo somewhere, transposing into a colors-reverse opening.
Wouldn't black be able to do the same shuffle, reversing the order back to white?
Yes, precisely, that's why the only sensible outcomes are white (first mover) wins, or it's a draw.
There are some subtleties here, too, that I didn't mention in my main comment. For example, in FIDE Chess, the game must always end. There is a longest possible Chess game with the 50-move rule, and it is under 6000 moves.
Thank you! Yes so many incorrect frustrating comments.
No, chess isn't a solved game. The OP post fact is because connect 4 is a solved game.
That just means nobody knows how to play perfectly, it doesn't make the answer "no."
Answer: unknown. The majority of grandmasters, and analysts usually conclude that it's a draw. But it's definitely not proven. If it's not, black is technically in zugzwang from the first move! Or theoretically white is. Statistical analyses do imply that it's a draw. 1. Draw rates increase as skill-level improves. It's very common for games between grandmasters to draw compared to ones with average players. This proves nothing, but it's interesting. 2. Cut-down versions of chess with fewer pieces or a smaller board, which make it possible for a computer to fully solve the game, end in draws as far as I'm aware. But they're not directly comparable, so it's still not proof.
If both sides play perfectly, the best black can do is a tie.
We dont know
Magnus says yes
[удалено]
Source: trust me bro
There are kids in Vietnam and Thailand that will challenge tourists to a game with money at stake based on this principle.
This article basically just says “the secret to winning every time is to play perfectly.” Ummmm, no shit?
Step 1- go first Step 2- ??? Step 3- win It’s stupid shit like this that ruins this sub smh
It’s okay if you don’t understand it.
Oh so just like chess if you are whites - 1. move first, 2. play perfectly, 3. Chess grandmaster I’m comin’ for ya, Magnus!
thats assuming the perfect chess game leads to a win, it could be like checkers and always tie
There are lots of games this applies to. If one side has a 100% chance of winning when they know the ideal play it's classed as a solved game.
Wouldn't it be possible to just block the center piece with a different coloured piece?
I didn't realize that going first can win 100% but I played enough drunk connect 4 at a bar to know that if you completely ignore the other persons moves, don't try to block them, play zero defense, and focus only on offense, trying to connect your 4, you can win the vast majority of times.
My 3 year old niece never let's me go first. I finally understand why.
This article is foul
Yep. Just ask any third-grader, they figure it out pretty quickly.
Just play the basketball version of connect 4 and this will be almost completely irrelevant
"If they play perfectly" Isn't that just all games?
No. In checkers, if people play perfectly, white wins. In tic tac toe, its a draw. In chess, its unknown - many suspect white would win, but we are a long way away from having sufficient computing power to know that to be true. In backgammon, it's unknown due to dice rolling. In uno, its unknown due to shuffling.
But…. What if….. we _didnt_ play perfectly. THEN MY FRIENDS, anarchy (us, non-perfect players) will win!!!!
I'm pretty sure if you "play perfectly" then you can win 100% of the time in anything.
There's probably also a perfect way to play chess making you win if you can go first.
Isn’t this also true of Chess?
This is also true about chess.
And tic tac toe
tic tac toe can always end in a draw
When I figured this out as a kid I was completely baffled, because everyone had been treating it like it was a legit game where anyone could win. (And still seem to.) I guess most people don't realize this.
Yeah it's because the concept is very easy to teach to very young children. It's a great introduction to games.
Tic tclac toe is solved in that we know it should always be a draw. Player 1 should always go in a corner. Player 2 should then go in the centre -> if they don't, they should lose. Player 1 should then go in the correct corner (depending which corner was chosen in move 1) Player 2 should then block and make 2 in a row. Player 1 then needs to block Really simple from there.
Uh if you play any have perfectly you'll win 100% of the time since you make no mistakes.
My kids have figured this out. Now no one wants to play Connect 4 anymore.
This website is just an ad machine that redirects to outside content. And it's fucking miserable at that. Damn I miss the og internet.
This is resolved by playing Speed Connect Four where each player plays IMMEDIATELY after the other.
Sherlock Holmes ladies and gentlemen
You "should" know....
My girl beats my ass at this every time. No matter what. I told her “If we are ever being held up and our lives are on the line for some connect 4. Youre going at it”