About this game Othello Online
Development notes
Two time limits
A turn-based game needs a total that bounds the game and a cap that bounds one person's wait. The 45-second cap blocks rather than deducts: if it only stopped charging after 45 seconds, the opponent would still sit through a four-minute move. The increment exists because Othello's last moves are worth the most, and a bank-only clock pushes them into one-second decisions.
Disconnects use the same rules
A disconnected player's clock keeps running and is not handed back on return; giving time back would make dropping the connection a tactic. Forfeits are 64–0 even when the leaver was ahead, since any exception would reward leaving while winning. Empty squares go to the winner so that a leader gains nothing by ending the game early.
Weak, not broken
Lower levels lose mainly through a chance of playing a random legal move; an AI that only reads less makes consistently odd moves and looks broken rather than weak. Each level has a depth ceiling, and its time budget can only cut the search short on a slow device, so a faster phone does not make Hard harder. Depth 7 beat depth 6 in 73.3% of 30 test games but took over a second per move at fixed depth, so the search deepens one step at a time within the budget.
Every term on one scale
The evaluation adds corners, square values, mobility, frontier discs, corner-anchored edge discs and, later in the game, disc count. An early version gave mobility, which runs from −100 to 100, a large weight, and in simulation the AI traded corners for options, once passing up a free corner. Every term is now brought to about the same ±100 range before weighting, and corners carry the largest weight in every phase.
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