The post I'm replying to said:

> It's not obvious to me that othello is much more complicated than checkers.

How is that not saying it's trivial when the context is a thread mentioning that Checkers has already been solved.

In the past, "solving" games has often been done through novel changes in hardware and/or approaches and algorithms as I understand it. The person you replied to stated that they didn't know why Othello was an achievement beyond checkers. That doesn't mean it's trivial, but it also doesn't mean it required any additional insight or advances to do so if it's not specifically more complicated than checkers.

They then went on to qualify their statement with the information that they don't specifically remember the rules of Othello. In a discussion held in good faith, this should be assumed to be an invitation to add additional insight as to why Othello might be more complicated.

You either know the reason why and didn't state it, or believe it's more complicated based on authorities you trust and didn't relate that and instead stated it authoritatively, or don't know it at all and misrepresented it. None of those are very useful for discussion. The former two are easy to rectify by explaining, qualifying, or referring someone to additional info though, and would have been a more useful way to respond.

Ultimately though, it sort of feels like you're reaching for an additional interpretation that makes an earlier misinterpretation still valid, when you could just say "oops. Most of my comment still stands as accurate, but I guess I misinterpreted your point."

Edit: from looking at you profile, it appears you are a CS professor. Perhaps part of the issue is context. This is a public forum, not a classroom, and while in a classroom your statements can be taken with an assumed authority, nobody necessarily knows that about you here when you post, so some additional qualification of your statements or background may be warranted.

Reread my comments in "good faith" as you say and you won't need to write four paragraphs critiquing my one paragraph comment.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of good faith or not to see that you were responding to statements that not only the person you're responding to didn't say, but weren't actually said by the original person (trivia != trivial). That said, I assumed you actually care about what you are communicating, so provided what I thought was constructive criticism.

I guess you're either in a frame of mind you can accept it as it was meant or you aren't.