In message
<[email protected]>,
Willemien <[email protected]> writes
Go is in principle a drawing game.
Proper komi (in my humble opinion) should result that optimal
(perfect) play leads to a draw.
That some programs cannot cope with integer komi/ draws/ jigo is a
problem of those programs and not an unfair advantage to the programs
who can cope with it.
(a simple way to cope with it is to shift the komi 1/2 point in the
programs advantage, (W +1/2, B -1/2) altough then the program will
treat draws as win, and possibly forgo a real win)
isn't it better way to shift it in the other direction, and try and
ensure a win by a sufficient margin to overcome the program's
misunderstanding of jigo?
Suppose soon that 2 programs arrive that play perfect on 9x9, do we
prefer that they draw against eachother and draw or win against all
other programs or that they win or lose depending on how lucky they
are with the colour assignment?
In principle you are right. But I accept that, where the bot events on
KGS are concerned, there is nothing I can do about it. I am in the
position of a particularly ineffective cat-herd. The change to using
the clean-up mechanism for KGS bots was made years ago, and I was told
that bot programmers should find it easy to implement; but there are
still bots that haven't implemented it, or have implemented it wrong.
If I insist on running events with integer komi, I know what will
happen. Some bots, including GNU Go, already support it; some will
implement it correctly; some will implement it wrong, so that strange
things happen; some will fail to support it, and thereby lose won games
to weaker programs; some may refuse to support it, and stop playing in
the events that I organise. I prefer to leave things as they are.
I announced earlier that I would be using integer komi of 7 for the 9x9
KGS bot tournaments this year. I have changed my mind, I will use
half-integer komi throughout. This is not an ideal decision, it is a
pragmatic one.
Nick
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Nick Wedd <[email protected]> wrote:
This is boring - most of you will want to skip it.
While beta-testing the improved tournament system on KGS, my task was to
report on the behaviour of the tournament-scheduler. But I happened to
notice several things the bots did. I report on these here.
In the biggest tournament I ran, the komi was set to 7, allowing jigo. It
seemed that gnugo3pt7 (a pre-MC build of GNU Go, which I ran) understood
this, but StoneGrid and Orego12 did not. As a result, gnugo3pt7 got several
undeserved wins against these stronger programs.
I now think that using integer komi is a mistake. I do not plan to use
it in future events. And it will not be used in the computer events in the
European Go Congress this summer.
The final test I did used 11x11 boards. When StoneGrid joined its game, it
immediately and repeatedly disconnected and reconnected. Indeed, it did
this so rapidly that I could deduce that Professor Drake lives rather close
to Portland, Oregon. StoneGrid had played normally in the previous tests,
so I guess it dislikes non-standard board sizes.
The clean-up phase was mishandled in at least two games between StoneGrid
and gnugo3pt7 (rounds 3 and 7). I am fairly sure that GNU Go does clean-up
correctly, so I suspect that StoneGrid doesn't.
TimeWaster (one of Aloril's delinquent bots) is somehow able to abuse the
clean-up system. At the end of every game, it claims that all its
opponent's stones are dead, and that its own stone (it never has more than
one on the board) is alive. Then the game enters the clean-up phase, there
is one pass, and the players make their claims again. This repeats
indefinitely.
My understanding is that this shouldn't be possible. Once the game has
entered the clean-up phase, there should be no more claims, all stones still
on the board when play stops for the second time should be treated as alive.
Nick
--
Nick Wedd [email protected]
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