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First KGS Computer Go Tournament

Sunday April 11th, 2005

This was the first "fully official" Computer Go tournament held on KGS. The results are also given on the KGS Tournament Result page.

Rules

19x19 board
Chinese rules, komi 7½
Thirty minutes each absolute time

Format

Five-round Swiss

Times

The first round started at 08:00 GMT, subsequent rounds started at 70 minute intervals. The result was announced at about 13:30 GMT.

Results

ProgramGNUDar51botnoidGo81NeuronDumbBottotalSOSSoDOSplaceProgrammer
GNU1311141215510101stGNU Go development team
Dar51031512111441162ndFrédéric Boissac & Eric Marchand
botnoid010513141231233rdDon Dailey
Go81040203151121314thTapani Raiko
Neuron020104051311405thAlexander Melnikov
DumbBot050402010301506thJohn Davies
In a program's row, 1 means a win, 0 means a loss. Subscripts indicate the number of the round. The 1s and 0s link to the SGF game records.

The undefeated winner was GNU, version 3.7 of GNU Go, written by the GNU Go developers.

Nickbot registered, but failed to appear.
daftbot and simplebot sent in a registration, but it was not noticed by Nick Wedd, who therefore failed to register it.

Comments

Congratulations to GNU Go (playing as 'GNU'), again the undefeated winner.

Overall, the tournament was successful, and enjoyed by the participants and onlookers. Several errors occurred, and are described here, so that they are less likely to be repeated.

Between rounds, GNU was seen to be playing a human opponent. This surprised its operator, who had correctly set open=f in its configuration file, to prevent it from offering games. However he had failed to set tournament=t, so it was willing to resume a game that had been abandoned earlier.

The email registering daftbot and simplebot was not titled "kgs tournament registration", as it should have been. This meant that it did not appear in the folder where the organiser, Nick Wedd, expected it. He did not find it until after the tournament had started.

The start time of the tournament was listed on the KGS page giving tournament details, correctly, as 09:00 BST or 08:00 GMT. Which it is shown as depends on browser settings. The organiser saw 08:00 GMT in Internet Explorer, and 09:00 BST in Netscape, and got the idea that it was due to start at 09:00 GMT. Fortunately he also decided to connect more than an hour before he thought the tournament was due to start, so as to deal with anyone who was confused by daylight saving times. However this did not give him enough extra time to search his various email folders for stray registrations.

Some programmers said that they might have entered if the time limits had been slightly longer.

Most such problems can be avoided if people are provided with clear documentation, and read it. Such documentation is now provided on this site: how to enter a program for a KGS Computer Go Tournament.