Magoo is an Othello playing program that was originally written in C++ for X Windows. It was ported to Java back in 1996. Use of first person singular on this page refers to Peter Gorniak, who you should be mailing with any comments or questions about MAGOO. First person plural are Andrew, Greg and myself, the original authors of the X version.

I see that the counter keeps increasing and I may have some time later this summer. Especially if you play MAGOO regularly (I know some people do!) please vote below on how you would like to see it change. Magoo Feature Poll Which enhancement should Peter implement next for Magoo? Cooler looking interface Better AI Hotseat human vs. human Internet human vs. human Other (mail Peter at gorniau@interchange.ubc.ca) Results Magoo News Magoo FAQs Java Version History Magoo Java Version

If you can't see the game you might be too low in the frame hierarchy. Click here to correct this.

Here's Peter's current web page.

Magoo News

• October 20, 2000
  Welcome to Magoo's new home, at the MIT Media Lab.
  
• June 2, 2000
  I made Magoo's graphics a bit fancier, hopefully also improving readability. Fixed some minor things like too-long player names, and an outstanding bug with the undo feature not working correctly when a game was finished. Also, I might have some time later this summer, so vote in the poll above if you have an opinion on further improvements to Magoo.
  
• August 6, 1999
  The realization that somebody is still playing Magoo made me feel so warm and fuzzy that after two years I actually updated Magoo again. The new version is 1.1 and the feature I added is the ability to undo and redo any number of moves as you are playing the game. There are also some other small updates (see version history below.) Let me know if you have problems, especially as there are now some Java 1.1 event model sections in the code. I also deleted some out-of-date info from this page.
  Correction: Netscape for Mac 4.6 doesn't implement a lot of Java 1.1.8, so I took all event listeners back out and changed some other code to conform to Java 1.0.2. The new features still work.
• July 2, 1999:
  Magoo was off-line for a while now due to some server trouble, but I put it back up at its old address after diligent Magoo players informed me of the fact. In fact, I'm so impressed that there actually are still people playing Magoo despite my lack of work on it and advertising of it that I'm tempted to have a look at the code again.
• April 23, 1997:
  There is an alpha version of a networked Magoo version online here. Note: This link usually does not work as I rarely run the server on my machine these days.
• March 30, 1997:
  I've been kept busy by school for a while now. However, during reading break, I managed to get a Magoo server running to the point where games are possible over the net. It still needs some fixing up to put out a first version, though. I'm hoping to find some time for Magoo around April 18, so look for an update the week after that (this is not a promise).
• December 27:
  Magoo is now at its new location (you're looking at it). The correct URL is http://grunthos.sci1.ubc.ca/~peter/magoo.html. The updated pages I'm talking about in the news item below are finally online, too. There's a new bug posted.
• December 1:
  Updated these pages to use frames. I still haven't decided whether I like frames or not, but I thought for this (namely making the game constantly visible in its own frame) they're pretty useful. Along with that went a total restructuring of this document, which will hopefully save me from answering some mail. Also, this page is now produced with HoTMetaL. (I'm working for the company that produces it currently and they convinced me that HoTMetaL is superior to my previous emacs-without-HTML-mode editing.)
• October 1:
  A new version is finally online. Speed has improved a bit and Magoo is about to appear on a second web site in French. There'll be a pointer to that here as soon as it exists.

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Magoo FAQ's

I guess I could've put all of these into question form?

Why does it say "Your Name" on the board?

Well, there's actually a text field in the beginning letting you fill in your name (meant for network games and thus not very useful without them).

Why haven't you worked on Magoo recently?

Magoo is a side project that sits somewhere at the bottom of my priority list. I'm surprised that I ever got around to doing this much. You can see my excuses on my project page. I also have not been the fastest at answering e-mail about Magoo. I apologize for this. Please look through this FAQ and see if I answer your question.

I can't play Magoo

Every Java enabled browser or applet viewer should run Magoo. I have seen it run on several platforms and under several browsers. If it doesn't work, check whether you have any output to stderr/stdout. If so, I'd appreciate you sending it to me.

I have problems with display/board-resizing...

Magoo is meant to run in colour. I know there are problems with monochrome terminals, and these will most likely not be fixed. Other display problems (like black-on-black button titles) may be due to the way your java implementation communicates with your OS. I try to set colours explicitly wherever I can to prevent this, but if you see something like this, please send me mail with info about your platform and the java implementation you're using.

I'd like Magoo's X Windows code

I have not given this code out to many people, partly due to a lack of a stable anonymous ftp server on my side, and partly because the old code is a mess. However, if you bug me enough, I'll probably get around to it sometime.

I'd like to have Magoo's (Java) code

My response here depends on your intentions. I readily give out the code to people writing othello programs themselves (there have been quite a few of these requests) or wanting to look at my search engine. If you want to put Magoo on your web site I will give the the class files if you guarantee that you will not be charging people. If you want to buy Magoo to make a profit of it in any manner you can still send me mail, but be warned that I will say 'no' to all offers that take the rights to the code out of my hands or disallow Magoo to appear anywhere else on the web.

Why 'MAGOO'?

MAGOO stands for Mayer-Agno-Gorniak-OthellO. That'd be the original authors of the X version. Only the Gorniak is left now.

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Java MAGOO History

version 1.2, June 2, 2000

• Graphical changes. Board and progress now have shadows, as does the lettering on the margin. Increased margin size due to this. New little arc drawn to give disks 3D effect (not very good, but oh well..) Some colour changes for better readability.
• Cutting of names of players too long for labels, labels now left aligned
• Fixed undo/redo bug occuring when game was complete.

version 1.1, August 6, 1999

• removed the 'Close' button to close the playing board and added the appropriate window listener to the frame instead. This means that the normal close button the OS puts on the window should now work.
• updated some event handlers to the 1.1 event model (not all, by far)
• Added 'Redo' and 'Undo' buttons to the playing board. Pressing 'Undo' undoes Magoo's last move as well as your own. Pressed multiple times it goes back through the games history until the beginning of the game is reached. After pressing 'Undo', 'Redo' is enabled to go forward in the game's history up to the point the game is currently at. At any position in the history it is possible to start playing again from that game state onwards, in which case all moves recorded after that game state are deleted from the history.
• The field to enter the player name now appears again, even though it's still somewhat without purpose.

  version 1.0.2, October 1, 1996
  

• if you watch stdout you can see how many boards magoo evaluates per turn (this was for debugging, I left it in by accident)
• Couple o'more speedups
• Magoo now reads all its strings from the page it is on, so that it's easy to translate into other languages. This is due to a request from France for Magoo.
• removed interface for changing heuristic on page as it was too obscure. Will reappear.

  version 1.0.1, August 1996 (never appeared online)
  

• removed some object creations to increase speed (disks are now ints again)
• added functionality to let user change heuristic

  version 1.0, May 19, 1996
  

• added depth effect to disks (artistically inaccurate, but simple)
• MAGOO now highlights the move it chose to make
• MAGOO also highlights whichever move it is currently thinking about during its decision process
• eliminated board flickering when player tries to make an illegal move
• improved speed a little (not enough)

  alpha 2, May 18, 1996:
  

• MAGOO now admits correctly to loosing a game
• fixed update problems
• added choice of player colour
• added player name
• changed colours to match page
• changed position and size of progress bar

  alpha 1, May 17, 1996:
  

• first online version

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MAGOO Java Version

Yes, I (Peter Gorniak) have finally found enough time to put out aversion of MAGOO in Java. Version 1.0 is out, so everything should work :). Just choose one of the three skill levels, choose your colour, enter your name and click the button. That should pop up the MAGOO othello board. You can open as many boards as you like, but of course your performance will get awful pretty quickly. Note that I had to simplify the search engine a bit due to Java's slow performance (compared to the original C++ version). Still, things may take QUITE a while in expert mode. Please let me know of any bugs you find, features you want to see (first see list below) and games MAGOO beat.

Problems I currently know about:

• I'm not stopping MAGOO when you leave the page currently. Depending on your netscape version your browser may wait until MAGOO has finished thinking before it displays another page. However, MAGOO is independent of the page you're on so ultimately you should be able to browse the web while you play.
• Things have gotten SLOW (let's blaim Java for this ;). There's not all that much I can do here without redesigning the engine. Note that Magoo is very playable on all levels except for expert on my machine at home, but I've seen it die on slower computers.
• The progress bar flickers a lot in Netscape (doesn't in applet viewer)
• I didn't notice this myself for a while because of Java's slowness, but: The "expert" level in Java MAGOO, however terribly slow it may seem to you, actually corresponds to the "intermediate" level in the X windows version. Which means that "beginner" is a level so easy that we didn't see a reason to even put it on the X version :).

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