HOUNDS AND JACKALS VS KALAH

Hounds and jackals is the modern name given to an ancient Egyptian game that is known from several examples of gaming boards and gaming pieces found in excavations. The modern name was invented by Howard Carter, who found one complete gaming set in a Theban tomb of ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhat IV that dates to the 12th Dynasty. The latter game set is one of the best preserved examples and is today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He called it Hounds contra Jackals. Another, less often used modern name is fifty-eight holes. The gaming board has two sets of 29 holes. Gaming pieces are ten small sticks with either jackal or dog heads. The game appeared in Egypt, around 2000 BC and was mainly popular in the Middle Kingdom. In the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, Pharaoh Seti (Cedric Hardwicke) and Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) are shown playing the game. Hounds and Jackals, also known as 58 Holes, is a well-known Bronze Age board game which was invented in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago. Hounds and Jackals appeared in Egypt, around 2000 BC and was mainly popular in the Middle Kingdom. William Mathew Flinders Petrie initially discovered the game and published about it in 1890. More than 40 examples of the game have been revealed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, around the Levant and Mediterranean since that time. Sticks were made of expensive materials such as ivory, silver and gold based on the findings at some of the archaeological sites. Wood was also used in the preparation of ordinary pegs, but such examples would not have survived. The complete set of this Egyptian game discovered in 1910 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter is now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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Kalah, also called Kalaha or Mancala, is a game in the mancala family invented in the United States by William Julius Champion, Jr. in 1940. This game is sometimes also called "Kalahari", possibly by false etymology from the Kalahari desert in Namibia. As the most popular and commercially available variant of mancala in the West, Kalah is also sometimes referred to as Warri or Awari, although those names more properly refer to the game Oware. For most of its variations, Kalah is a solved game with a first-player win if both players play perfect games. The Pie rule can be used to balance the first-player's advantage. Mark Rawlings has written a computer program to extensively analyze both the "standard" version of Kalah and the "empty capture" version, which is the primary variant. The analysis was made possible by the creation of the largest endgame databases ever made for Kalah. They include the perfect play result of all 38,902,940,896 positions with 34 or fewer seeds. In 2015, for the first time ever, each of the initial moves for the standard version of Kalah(6,4) and Kalah(6,5) have been quantified: Kalah(6,4) is a proven win by 8 for the first player and Kalah(6,5) is a proven win by 10 for the first player. In addition, Kalah(6,6) with the standard rules has been proven to be at least a win by 4. Further analysis of Kalah(6,6) with the standard rules is ongoing. For the "empty capture" version, Geoffrey Irving and Jeroen Donkers (2000) proved that Kalah(6,4) is a win by 10 for the first player with perfect play, and Kalah(6,5) is a win by 12 for the first player with perfect play. Anders Carstensen (2011) proved that Kalah(6,6) was a win for the first player. Mark Rawlings (2015) has extended these "empty capture" results by fully quantifying the initial moves for Kalah(6,4), Kalah(6,5), and Kalah(6,6). With searches totaling 106 days and over 55 trillion nodes, he has proven that Kalah(6,6) is a win by 2 for the first player with perfect play. This was a surprising result, given that the "4-seed" and "5-seed" variations are wins by 10 and 12, respectively. Kalah(6,6) is extremely deep and complex when compared to the 4-seed and 5-seed variations, which can now be solved in a fraction of a second and less than a minute, respectively.

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