The History of Reversi
A Victorian parlor game, reinvented twice over a century apart.
A Victorian Original
Reversi first appeared in England in the early 1880s, amid a peculiarly Victorian dispute: two players, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett, each claimed to have invented the game, and each published dueling pamphlets in 1888 accusing the other of stealing the idea. Historians still aren't sure who actually deserves credit.
Early Reversi let players place their first few discs anywhere on the board, and some Victorian rule sets had a completely surrounded side lose control of the whole board in one move - quirks that were eventually dropped as the rules were standardized.
Reinvented in Japan
The game resurfaced in Japan in 1973, when Goro Hasegawa refined Reversi's rules - fixing the four starting discs in their familiar diagonal pattern and dropping the older variant rules - and released it through Tsukuda Original under a new name: Othello, a nod to Shakespeare's play and its black-versus-white central conflict.
Othello became hugely popular in Japan and then worldwide, spawning a World Othello Championship held annually since 1977 and cementing the standardized ruleset - the one used in this app - as the version played competitively today.
A Battleground for Computers
Othello turned out to be an unusually good subject for computer game-playing research: its rules are simple, but the sheer number of reachable positions long kept naive strategies from working well.
In August 1997, Michael Buro's program Logistello defeated reigning human world champion Takeshi Murakami 6 games to 0 - a landmark result that arrived the same year as chess's Deep Blue victory. Othello engines have only grown stronger since, and the game is now considered solved, or very nearly so, from a wide range of positions.