Talk:Kalah

Kalah(6,7)
I'm not sure if anyone is interested in the standard version of Kalah(6,7) (i.e. with 7 seeds in each bin), but I ran a deep search with the 34-seed endgame database (about 8 days and over 6 trillion nodes searched!). The result is trending towards a win for the first player. When I have time, I'll run a deep search of the "empty capture" variant. -Mark

Kalah(6,6) Update
I updated the results of Kalah(6,6) standard version (2/4/2016). Of the 10 possible first player moves, 2 are proven wins, 2 are proven losses, one is trending towards a win, and the rest are probable ties. To make further progress, I'll need a computer with 64GB of RAM so I can compute the 35 and 36-seed endgame databases. Hopefully, I'll have one in the coming months. -Mark

07/21/18: Finally purchased a computer with 64GB RAM! I have already computed the huge 35-seed endgame database (13.3GB) for the standard version of the game. Currently working on the proof for Kalah(6,6), standard version. (Looks like this will take some time, even with 52GB of endgame databases loaded in RAM...)

Correct description
A correct description with sample games, problems, detailed history and a longer bibliography can be found at http://mancala.wikia.com/wiki/Kalah ---84.175.151.175 (talk) 08:04, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Untitled
Added info on computer analysis of Kalah(6/6). This is one of my first edits and I can't seem to get the tables formatted correctly. I'll be back later to fix the tables after I figure out how. MarkR27 — Preceding unsigned comment added by MarkR27 (talk • contribs) 22:14, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Clarification needed. The rules currently aren't clear as to: (a) when the games ends (presumably when either player clears their side of seeds), and (b) if PlayerA has cleared his side and the game is ended, then what happen to PlayerB's seeds still on-the-board (ie, are those seeds moved to PlayerB's pit and along with those that he's captured?

First player advantage? Can someone explain the reason the first player to move has such a great advantage over other, more traditional Mancala games? Also, if someone can do a mathematical explaination of the game -- similar to the math behind the article Go, I think the community would appreciate it. Thanks. Stexe

Reply to the above statements

 * The game ends as soon as one row is emptied. (standard rules by Champion)
 * The remaining seeds are moved to the store of the player who owns their pits.
 * Can we expect to have the standard game analyzed too? The empty capture variant is non-standard, less deep and not much played.
 * It is not correct that it is unusual for traditional mancala games to not have a significant first-move advantage. Dakon/Sungka/Congka is even a win in the first ply of the game. Toguz Kumalak also has a first move advantage. In Kalah (6,6) the first player can capture two seeds, while the second player can capture only one seed. In addition, the first player got the initiative and can maximize this advantage in the following moves.- 84.175.153.12 (talk) 07:27, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Kalah(6,6) with the empty capture rule is only a win by 2 for the first player, which is not much of an advantage considering how long the game is. I doubt that a human moving first could secure a win against my program. Kalah(6,6) is just too complex (even though I have posted 10 ply or so of perfect play). If anyone would like to try, I'd be glad to play. It would be an interesting experiment! Also, analysis of the standard rule game has been posted for Kalah(6,4) and Kalah(6,5). I'm still working on Kalah(6,6) with the standard rules. So far, I've proven that it is a win by at least 4 for the first player. A full proof like I did for the empty capture variant might not be possible with my current hardware (32GB RAM). With an upgrade to 64GB RAM, I could add the 35 and 36-seed endgame databases, which should make it solvable. - Mark

In what year did Willie finalize the rules that are more or less the same as we know today?--Sonjaaa 15:02, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Weblinks

I removed the last weblink as it 404'ed. Regarding the mathematical explanation: I haven't found any deeper research in Kalah so it would be hard to back anything up without good sources. 78.53.102.138 (talk) 08:53, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Bantumi
I understand that that is not the game's original name, and I am not proposing that anything on the page is changed.

However, there is a page redirect from Bantumi that points here, and yet not a single mention of that word on the page. It seems a little odd to redirect wiki users and then not explain the link between what they searched for and where they ended up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.186.34.143 (talk) 15:35, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

The first section says that the traditional game starts with 4 stones per pit. The following section implies that the traditional game starts with 3 per pit. I don't know which is correct, but this should be fixed. 72.42.84.75 (talk) 00:18, 10 April 2017 (UTC) Thad

Broken Links
Both of the external links in this article appear to be broken. Sbj42 (talk) 03:23, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070602024907/http://www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/VirtualExhibits/countcap/pages/kalah.html to http://www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/VirtualExhibits/countcap/pages/kalah.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080412055723/http://www.fdg.unimaas.nl/educ/donkers/games/kalah/ to http://www.fdg.unimaas.nl/educ/donkers/games/kalah

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As played in Denmark...
In Denmark, "Kalaha" is usually played in the (6,4) or (6,6) version with all or some of these three variant rules (even if printed rules may agree with the standard rules given in the article): E.g., rule 1 and 2 are assumed here: "How to win every time", where as rule 3 is unspecified but irrelevant as the article explains how player 1 may score more than half the sseeds in the first round of the (6,6) game!
 * 1) When the last seed ends in a house that contains seeds, the turn continues by sowing all these seeds. This rule may be limited to the player's own houses, but usually does not have this limitation. With perfect play, it tilts the game even further towards a 1st-player advantage.
 * 2) A player does not empty the opposite house when ending in an empty house of one's own (probably making the game a little less tilted).
 * 3) At the end of the game, the remaining seeds go into the store of the player who has emptied all stores rather than into the opponent's store (improving a bit on the chances for a player who is far behind).

Now, if these variants are Danish only, they probably do not deserve to be mentioned in the article. But does anyone else know these variants? And perhaps even have sources (more appropriate than the newspaper article I link to)?--Nø (talk) 10:34, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

First player wins?
In this edit, User:Ettrig changed this:
 * A solved game for most of its variations, with first-player win with perfect play.

into
 * Kalah is a solved game for most of its variations. That is, if both players play perfectly, the first player wins.

But there is, I believe, no argument why all solvable Kalah variants must be first-player wins, though there are obvious reasons why it a priori is more likely than a 2nd-player win. I believe something like this would be more defendable:
 * For most of its variations, Kalah is a solved game with a first-player win if both players play perfect games.

--Nø (talk) 08:02, 8 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I agree. (I still think my expansion is in line with what was intended. But strictly i changes the meaning, and that was not my intention.) --Ettrig (talk) 09:31, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Kalah
There is a 1961 game called Kalah developed in mainframe by DECUS written by Roland Silver

Empty/Zero Capture Rule is Not a Variant - See Patent
Captures do not require opponent pieces opposite. Original patent text starting at line 44, right column:''If the last game piece 22 is placed in an empty pit 21 all of the game pieces in the laternally aligned pit of the opposing player are captured. The captured pieces together with the piece making the capture are removed and placed in that player’s bowl or kalah 23. A capture ends that player’s turn. While it would have been clearer to have the text any captured pieces'', the condition in the first sentence only requires an empty pit (later in the sentence clarified to be on the player’s side) for the last distributed piece. Researchers who have analyzed the game understand all of the game pieces … are captured to include the case of 0 game pieces.

Todd (talk)

Related to nim?
I wonder if this game is related to nim, which also has a winning strategy. The first or second person to play in nim can always win, depending on the initial configuration. David Spector (talk) 23:11, 10 February 2022 (UTC)


 * you may be interested in:
 * Fillers, W. R., Linderman, B., & Simoson, A. (2014). Mancala as Nim. The College Mathematics Journal, 45(5), 350–356. https://doi.org/10.4169/college.math.j.45.5.350
 * I didn't read it in its entirety, but it analyzes a highly simplified mancala variant which it demonstrates as being "a somewhat camouflaged version of Nim". If you have an account with a university library or some such similar thing you can probably access the article for free, otherwise I doubt it'll be worth the expense tbh HumbleSolipsist1 (talk) 23:05, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Source on the claim that it was invented by Champion in 1940?
I have spent some time looking for a source to cite stating that Kalah was invented by Champion in 1940. I have found several papers which make this claim... but they are all papers on AI/game-theory, and only make the claim in passing, with no clarification as to why they believe it to be true (one of them even cited wikipedia as a source for that information!). Champion seems to have not taken credit for its invention, and claimed it was an ancient game. I'm not saying he didn't invent it, but that does seem to create a bit of trouble sourcing that information, since it appears the only reason to believe he did is that he was the first to sell it at scale.

Now, he did trademark the name, but that doesn't mean much with respect to the game's invention afaik. He also submitted a patent, but it appears to me (as a layperson, feel free to correct me if you understand patents better than I do) that his patent is merely for the design of the board, not the rules of the game. The rules of the game are described, but don't seem to be referred to as the "invention", and the patent is classified under A63F11/00 - Game accessories of general use. There are other classifications it could be listed under if it was the actual game being patented, such as A63F3/00 - Board games; Raffle games.

According to the 1963 press release in The Elliott Avedon Museum and Archive of Games article on Kalah, "In the year 1905, William J. Champion... came across an article concerning the ancient game of Kalah". Are there any leads on what this 1905 article may have been? HumbleSolipsist1 (talk) 23:30, 26 May 2024 (UTC)


 * also on this note - why 1940? That's not when Champion made it publicly available, and, as previously stated, he doesn't seem to have taken credit for its invention... so who said it was invented in 1940? Surely not Champion. Someone who knew him personally...? HumbleSolipsist1 (talk) 04:18, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Saying someone "invented" Kalah in the 20th century is like saying chess was invented when the modern rules were codified. (According to Rules of chess, you could e.g. pick any of the years 1497, 1749, 1828, 1854, 1928, 1952 or 1982 for chess, as well as several other years, but in fact, something like AD 800 would make more sense as a date for an "invention".) Kalah is (or may be taken to be) a specific combination of the many variant rules and lay-outs for Mancala games that existed prior to the 20th century. So, the name and the year may (or may not) be correct, but calling it an invention is not. And yes, without a good source, the statement should better be removed alltogether. Nø (talk) 15:55, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I take your point re:"invented", but, to be clear, that was my own poor wording, not the article's (the article says "The Kalah variation was developed in the United States by William Julius Champion, Jr. in 1940").
 * "And yes, without a good source, the statement should better be removed alltogether."
 * Alright, I figured that may be the case. I think it'll probably be easier to find a good source on its initial release date or some such thing. I'll look for one later today and replace the text with something I've got a good source for (if I find anything, else I'll probably just remove the aforementioned sentence).
 * HumbleSolipsist1 (talk) 20:50, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

comment about mancala at Cheops?
I removed the mention of the oldest Mancala board being found in Cheops. This seems tangential to the topic of this article (that sort of info is better suited to the Mancala article... now, it also seems at odds with the info in Mancala, but, again, that debate is better suited to the talk page of the relevant article), and also because of the citation used - "exhibit at Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley CA; October 2022". I've never seen a museum exhibit being used as a citation before... That can't be a reliable source, right? Given how often museums cycle their exhibits, it seems impossible to verify.

HumbleSolipsist1 (talk) 06:39, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

first remotely played computer game?
| this archived blog post says that the pdp-1 implementation of kalah was the "first remotely played computer game." If that's the case, it's definitely worth including in Kalah, but I'd like a better source than a blog post. Something to keep an eye out for.

HumbleSolipsist1 (talk) 23:58, 28 May 2024 (UTC)