On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 3:04 AM, Adrian Petrescu <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > This is a can of worms you are opening. This is a very old issue going back decades in computer chess too. The primary issue is whether this is just a contest of programming talent or whether it's a contest to encourage the best possible artificial go player. It cannot help but be a programmer contest even if there are not restrictions. Another issue is that if you limit the hardware, you could effectively be shutting out some competitors. No everyone is comfortable with whatever uniform hardware is chosen. Someone will surely produce some go playing hardware, the equivalent of a "deep blue" but for GO and it would be tragic to shut out this possibility. This is probably a good thing however if it's not pushed too far and becomes the standard format for all go tournaments. There is nothing wrong with programming contests. > > Cheers, > Adrian > > _______________________________________________ > Computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go >
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