Move sequences are automatically highlighted and made clickable. If the previous move number appears earlier in the comment, the sequence continues from that move. Otherwise, it's treated as a variation from the main line. This can be error-prone with multiple sequences in one comment, so please use the Preview button to check your work before posting.
To force a sequence to be treated as a main line variation, precede it with a vertical bar
(|). The copy variation button (⧉) includes this bar automatically.
For more complex discussions, you can name a sequence by adding the name in square
brackets at the end, e.g. 15.p9 [a]. Later in the same comment, or in
any following comment, you can branch off that variation by wrapping the name in vertical
bars, like this:|a| 16.o13
The variation name must start with
a letter, contain only letters, numbers, and dashes (-), and is case-sensitive.
Comments use UTF-8 encoding, so you can include emojis 😉, non-English characters, and other Unicode symbols.
You can also use HTML entities like — for an em-dash (—) or → for a right arrow (→).
For safety reasons, most HTML tags are stripped, except:
<b>, <i>, <u> — bold, italic, underline<em>, <strong> — emphasis, strong text<s>, <strike> — <sup>, <sub> — superscript, subscript<blockquote> — indented quotes
<code> — fixed-width font<pre> — multi-line preformatted text
<br> — forces a line break
39.r12 40.s16 41.u19 42.v19 43.v17 44.t20 45.r17 46.q17 47.p11 48.o11 49.p9 50.p10 51.n10 52.k11 53.j9 54.i12 55.h14 56.g13 57.f13 58.e12
If you set Twixtbot to Monte Carlo Tree Search = 0, it looks just one move ahead, but it's a really good one. It is still stronger than me at that setting. One-shot neural net intuition. Then when you turn on the tree search, it's pretty hard to beat. (Still, it hasn't solved the game.)
In a game like Twixt, you are staring down a combinatorial explosion. To manage xⁿ, instead of increasing n, it's better to decrease x. That is to say, instead of just trying to brute force yourself further into the combinatorial explosion, if you hone your intuition to see the best x=2 moves instead of the best 3 or 4, it just gets easier to see further down the line. If you can get close to x=1, you can see very far indeed. And as David demonstrated, sometimes that also makes the line shorter.