Another way to give handicap would be to set komi to different values [range: -(board area - 1) .. (board area - 1)].
One advantage is that komi allows for "exact" tuning, to the last point. You can also let the weaker player be white this way [without causing an uproar in the go community by giving white handicap stones. ;-)] You could go crazy and combine the two in interesting ways; say for instance you give black two handicap stones while setting komi to 19.5. Though this may not be appropriate for the main CGOS server, it could still be a healthy exercise for the agents. Cheers Joakim On 7/9/07, Don Dailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 10:10 -0700, terry mcintyre wrote: > I concur with Christian Nilsson; handicap stones permit the win-loss > ratio to approximate 50%, where it is more sensitive to improvements. > As one tweaks the program, the progress would be measurable within a > few games, one's handicap would decrease. > > Is it possible to tie together the handicap information and the > win-loss percentages into a unified ELO-type score? Would an > experiment be needed to measure the effect of handicap stones on the > probability of winning? I think the common formula is 100 ELO per stone? I think we could start with this guess (or a better one) and after a few weeks of play we could do a statistical analysis to see if things are as they should be. Then we could make any adjustments if needed. CGOS would still use the same scheduling algorithm - trying to prevent serious mismatches. So we would avoid matches that required many stones handicap although they would appear from time to time. The ELO formula is the same. Whatever program is getting the extra stones is assumed (for rating purposes) to be 100H ELO stronger where H is the number of stones handicap. The constant 100 might have to be adjusted of course. It may even be that we have to use a different constant depending where you are at on the ELO scale. With enough games it might be possible to determine if this is needed or not. I've discussed this with Steve in private emails in the past. It might not be difficult to make this auto-adjust. If the server notices that some value isn't predicting the winner very accurately, a tiny adjustment is made. - Don _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
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