I had written a toy Connect Four webpage in college, but I wanted to program something that could surprise me the way that Stockfish and other good chess engines pull off strategies never conceived by human players. On a Saturday morning in August 2020, I suddenly wondered how come I had never written any meaningful software that employed AI. This is a tale of a nice and rewarding personal adventure that I embarked upon, nothing more. One fair warning: nothing in this post discusses achievements that should be considered technically impressive or potentially even interesting. If you want to check out the app without going through this whole post, here’s the App Store link: This post will attempt to go into significant detail regarding how this weekend curiosity ballooned to become the #1 game on the Japanese Mac App Store for April, May and June 2021 - dethroning Asphalt 9: Legends and Steam Link, both of which I assume are multi-million dollar initiatives - and being downloaded roughly 500 times a day worldwide.

Since late 2020, I’ve been spending many a weekend working on my own software implementation of Othello, a well-known Japanese board game. Adventures in Writing Othello Software for iOS and macOS