When names collide

ACK in 2002, I chose to work on a project which dealt with the game Othello, also known as Reversi. To put rigour into development, I chose a name for it. I did so without paying much thought to any future potential. A careful and exhaustive investigation of name collisions simply did not seem worthwhile at the time.

Having searched the Web at a shallow level, I did not know of any name collisions when I chose the title “Othello Master”. I even explained about the choice of the name in my report and proposal. It refelects on the way I viewed the choice of the name at that time:

This project has been set to produce an application which will be titled Othello Master due to some visual similarity to an older game called Chess Master. It will require knowledge of game theory and advanced computer graphics.

The name was therefore conceived in a most innocent way. It was only less than a year ago that I became aware of a name collision, for which I am to blame. Search engines had revealed a game from the mid-eighties, which suddenly resurfaced in results from archival pages. It ran on the Amiga, but perhaps on other platforms too.

I sometimes wonder if I should get a hold of this game and play it. Mine is Open Source and GPL‘d so no-one is prevented from playing it for free. In fact, the downloads page is always there for those interested. As for the number of downloads, I believe it itches 1,000, but I rarely keep track of the numbers. It can run on all platforms and there is even a Windows executable.

Other items on Othello Master:

• Collaboration Sought
• OM Gets a Home

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 4:36 am and is filed under General, Othello, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.