Evan Daniel wrote:

It is entirely within the power of the other bots to not lose on time.

I am not sure that is true.

LeelaBot should be perfectly capable of playing about 12 moves per second in the default configuration.

However, it seems either KGS or kgsGtp do not (correctly) account for connection lag, or the interface adds lag of its own. If it is indeed connection lag that is the problem, KGS is about 150ms from the tournament machine, which means Leela can't actually play more than 6 or 7 moves per second at best, even if the engine itself would move at infinite speed. I think that in the actual game, the speed was closer to 2 moves per second and this was not enough to avoid the time loss.

CGOS provides some lag compensation which removes most of the symptons but does not actually solve the problem. People with fast connections have more thinking time. If you have a connection hiccup at a bad moment, you can still lose on time (this happened 1 or 2 times with Leela in a few hundred games). But in general it is less of a problem to play out games completely, and in fact Leela does exactly that on CGOS.

I also really do not see what HBotSVN has done wrong. Surely the engine can't be at fault because it could not identify dead groups correctly (if that is a requirement, we will all be unable to play tournaments until about the time the game is solved). I also don't see what could possibly be the objection against playing until the game is finished. These rules are sensible for computer games and work fine on CGOS.

I do not like to cripple Leela ("make its time handling more conservative"). I would like some advice on whether other people agree that KGS(gtp) does not completely compensate for lag. If it does compensate completely, then the error must be at my side and I will focus on fixing whatever it is that causes the moving speed to be below what it should be.

If it is indeed a KGS flaw I may add a workaround to Leela as simple as doing time = time / 10 as soon as winrate >95% or so. There is still a possibility of losing on time then but it should happen less.

At the time when I was playing with my chess engine on the chess servers, those servers provided "timeseal" and "timestamp" programs that compensated for lag. It was no problem to play at timecontrols of game in 1 minute with such tools, without any workarounds.

PS. I sent a correction to the hardware but I see the report still has the old information. LeelaBot was on 1 x Intel Xeon 5355 @ 2.66Ghz, so "only" 4 CPUs.

--
GCP
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
computer-go@computer-go.org
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/

Reply via email to