I watched MoGo play a few games on KGS. I think it plays very nicely
most of the time. I find it hard to judge its strength, as it
occasionally does some strange things, but overall it plays a sound
game.
One thing that may make human players biased with regards to its
strength is its conservative play when ahead. It seems just as happy
to win by 1.5 points as by 11.5 points.
Mark
On 3/20/07, Sylvain Gelly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
It plays fixed depth and I pre-calculated what level to make
it play at 1800 strength. I came pretty close, Fat-25 is
playing at 1836 at the moment and doesn't require too much
CPU power. It's Lazarus scaled down to play fast.
That is good then!
I threw in a gnuchess
gnuchess seems a strong go player ;-).
So now we are all waiting for this new promising CGOS version, with
all the great features :-).
Good work,
Sylvain
On Sun, 2007-03-18 at 13:53 -0400, Don Dailey wrote:
Hi Sylvain,
I think what you are looking isn't a strong Anchor player, but
strong players who are always available.
However, I do want to upgrade the Anchor player too, perhaps putting
up 2 Anchors. I will prepare a version of Lazarus - it will take a
few days. I'm not sure what my goal rating is - I want it to play
as strong as possible but still capable of being set up to run on
modest computing systems. So I will have to experiment. I think
it will easily be at least 1800 - perhaps as strong as 1900.
You will of course need opponents who are as strong as possible in
order to get accurate ratings. Unfortunately, you seem to have
a monopoly on the strong programs! I haven't seen anything yet
get beyond 2100 or so except versions of Mogo - which go all the
way to well over 2400 assuming the ratings are relatively accurate.
However, I'm sure that strong programs will follow.
Meanwhile, Lazarus will be on and off - I'll try to keep it mostly
on. I think there are at least 2 or 3 other programs in the same
range that are not playing. Perhaps they will come back, perhaps
with improvements.
I think some of these programs are stronger than Lazarus, it's just
that they are running on less hardware. Lazarus is running on a
core 2 duo 6700 and it benefits from thinking on the opponents time.
Some of these other programs are running on much slower pentiums and
still approaching similar levels (without pondering.) Yes, all that
stuff helps.
- Don
On Sun, 2007-03-18 at 15:10 +0100, Sylvain Gelly wrote:
2007/3/18, Don Dailey [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
I'm not so sure we need to have a really strong Anchor. The Anchor's
role is to prevent rating drift over the long term.
You are right about this Anchor's role. However, to be able to
accurately rate players, there is a need of opponents not too far from
their strength. Of course there are already quite a lot of players on
cgos, but they are not always connected, it is why I suggested the add
of an strong anchor (maybe here the name is badly chosen), always
connected.
I could also put together a fixed version of Lazarus. Not the
2100 strength version but a version playing at a fixed level
that would play the same strength on any computer. I could
not run it on the server and I could not run it all the time
from my home, but me might let 2 or 3 people run clones as
Anchors.
I think it would not too difficult to find volunteers to run it. For
the next few months, I am sure I can find some computer with some CPU
time for that.
Sylvain
- Don
On Sun, 2007-03-18 at 13:09 +0100, Sylvain Gelly wrote:
Hello Don, Nick, Magnus,
I here answer the 3 previous emails.
2007/3/18, Don Dailey [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Another possible candidate is Mogo, running at 3K play-outs, like
the
version running on CGOS right now.
I thought about that, the good thing is the resources taken (between
0.6 and 0.3 s per move), the problem is this limited version MoGo
seems to be too much intransitive.
Do you think any version of gnugo is suitable as an anchor?
I think gnugo is a very good anchor and very difficult to overfit. It
is good that ggexp is always playing. Last version of gnugo would also
be good. As Magnus said, gnugo is maybe too deterministic, but this is
only an issue if someone try to cheat by creating an winning opening
against gnugo (I managed to find an opening which makes 100% against
gnugo). I don't believe it is a practical issue then.
On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 18:45 -0500, Nick Apperson wrote:
one concern i have is that within a family of programs (such as
MC)
the estimated skill differences are overestimated. I would really
like to see an anchor that uses a different technique. I'm not
offering a solution. Thoughts?
One idea is to measure
