I'm not much of a participant in the field of computer go, but I am an avid observer, so it puzzles me when I see things like the recent 9x9 "World Championships" being plagued by issues of operator error, hardware malfunction, network outages, etc. Even when everything goes smoothly, it's hard to take the results too seriously when some programs are running on a 16-core dedicated machines, and others are running on the developer's personal laptop.
I propose a tournament be run (or an old one adapted) that uses Amazon Web Services' EC2 as the hardware platform for the competitors. The advantages are several: * Completely predictable and uniform hardware across each competitor. We can even make several divisions at different levels of hardware performance in order to reward those programs which "scale" better * It is very easy to (even programatically) create instances on demand and bring them down when the round is over, so that the costs of running such a thing can be minimized. * The chance of hardware or network failure is negligibly close to zero. * The virtual machines are completely flexible, so almost any strange combination of software dependencies can be accommodated It seems that such a thing would go a long way towards lending more legitimacy and consistency to computer go competitions. If a lot of people like the idea, I would be glad to help set up the infrastructure and assist developers in creating an AMI to host their bots. I also suspect that since AWS often give grants and discounts to worthy causes, they could be persuaded to donate the one or two days' worth of CPU hours needed for such a tournament. Cheers, Adrian
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