About the players:

Takeshi Murakami (32) is an English teacher living in Tokyo. He started playing Othello in 1981. In 1987 he placed second in the annual all-Japan Championships, considered to be the toughest regular human Othello tournament. He won this tournament in 1996 which qualified him for taking part in the 1996 World-Championships. Here he showed again a strong performance and became World-Champion.


(Courtesy of Yomiuri Shimbun)

Logistello is one of today's best Othello programs. It is based on novel evaluation-, opening book learning- and selective search techniques which I have presented in my Ph.D. thesis and considerably improved while working at NECI. The program is written in C and runs under UNIX on any machine with at least 32 MB of RAM. During the last four years Logistello placed first 17 times and second five times in the 23 international Othello tournaments. Logistello will play the match running on a PentiumPro/233MHz CPU [more details about Logistello can be found here].


"No, Logistello can't be used for weather forecasting"