I learned to play two new abstract games in 2024. The first was shogi, Japanese chess. Perhaps that’ll be the subject of another post. The second is Tak.
Tak was inspired by a novel by Patrik Rothfuss. A few years later, a game designer contacted the author and they collaborated to create the game in our world. It’s meant to be an elegant, timeless game, much like chess, shogi or go, and I think it does the job really well. The mechanism is simpler than shogi or chess, slightly more complex than go. It’s usually played on a 6×6 board (beginners sometimes play on 5×5 boards, and there are other variants as well) and one needs to build a chain of tiles from top to bottom, or left to right. To do so, one places tiles, or moves tiles.
The mechanism is very simple, but the interaction of stacks on the board can get very complex, and rapidly becomes impossible to calculate.
The game is not widely known, and I came across it in quite a curious way. My son Dorje was competing in a Rust programming language competition based on the popular Advent of Code, where one problem is posted for each day of the advent calendar. People can participate in Advent of Code for fun, to learn a new programming language, to compete to solve the problem as quickly as possible, and most interestingly, to write optimal code that runs the solution as quickly as possible.
Dorje came fifth out of the 144 entrants, winning some hardware (assuming it can get through customs, where’s it’s languishing right now), but the connection to Tak came via the eventual winner of the competition, alion02. Since each day’s entries were public (after the submission time), it’s possible to examine the other contestants solutions in order to learn from them. One of the projects on alion02’s GitHub repo was a Tak bot, a program to play Tak. alion02 also happens to be the highest-rated active human Tak player. Many, many years ago I wrote a chess bot, and Dorje has also written a chess bot and a shogi bot, so it got me curious. Obviously far less effort has been put into Tak than something like chess, but although the best bot is far ahead of the humans, it’s not invincible. alion02 has defeated the best bot at least once (and lost many, many times!)
Anyway, I have playing quite a lot of Tak. There’s a beginner tournament starting tomorrow and I’ve entered, just for the fun of losing to some humans rather than losing to a bot. If you happen to read this post shortly after I post it, there may just be time to enter.
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