XOT - Random opening program

Othello von Tsukuda

By now Othello/Reversi is being played at such a high level that many top players know by heart many moves of the most popular openings. As you play thousands of games online you used to have only two options. Either you play 20 or even 30 moves near the perfect line and get bored by knowledge reproduction, or you vary very early in the game and hope that your opponent does not take that advantage for an easy win. Several top players often played 1-2 bad moves early on and their friendly opponent responded with another bad move to make the position more interesting.

In 2010 Borja Moreno Fernández and I developed two lists of 8 move positions that are more or less even. We generated all possible openings and had two programs evaluate each of them at two different levels. Borja used that list in his game server eothello.com and I created the little tool named XOT which makes these lists useable for everyone. In Sweden and Great Britain there have already been tournaments in which these random openings generated by XOT have been used.

For further information you can visit http://xot.xmav.eu.