Hundred and seventh KGS Computer Go Tournament

Sunday November 16th, 2014

These results also appear on an official KGS page.

Rules

formatDouble round robin
board size19×19
rulesChinese
komi
time14 minutes plus 10/30s

Times

The first round started at 11:00 UTC.

Result table

PlaceNamecross-tableWinsSOSSoDOSNotes
AyaMC HiraB fuego NiceG MCark Orego gnugo
1AyaMC
X
W13R B17R W110R B12R W16R B112R B11R W18R B14R W19R W15R B111R 126565Winner
2HiraBot B03R W07R B010R
X
W05R B19R W111R W14R B16R W11R B112R W12R B18R 87734
3fuego19 W02R B06R W012R B15R W09R B011R
X
B17R W110R B13R W18R W14R W11T 77927
4NiceGo19N W01R B08R B04R W06R W07R B010R
X
W12R B15R W111R W13R B19R W112R 66612
5MCark W04R B09R B01R W012R W03R B08R B02R W05R B011R
X
B16R W17R B110R 3753
6Orego12 B05R W011R B02R W08R B04R B03R W09R B012R W06R B07R W010R
X
1740
7gnugo3pt8 B01T
X
070Quit before round 2

Black won 17 games and White won 19.

Players and format

Six players registered. I also registered gnugo3pt8, in case it was needed to avoid byes.

When I ran gnugo3pt8, it gave the error messages

Unknown message type -105 for channel org.igoweb.igoweb.client.gtp.aj@7024d0fa
Unknown message type -105 for channel org.igoweb.igoweb.client.gtp.a@45fcb00e
which it had never done before. My guess is that this was caused by a recent change to the way the KGS server handles communications. It worried me slightly, but it seemed not to affect gnugo3pt8's play.

However Detlef Schnicker reported that his program oakfoam, playing as NiceGo19N, had produced a much longer error message, ending with "Normal disconnection from server." I therefore feared that NiceGo19N, and maybe also other entrants, would be unable to play, and I included gnugo3pt8 in the first round with the other six entrants, in case there was an odd number of working programs.

Fortunately, all six entrants were able to play by the time the tournament started, so I removed gnugo3pt8 after round 1.

Results

The tournament ran very smoothly, without any incident that needed my attention.

Irrelevant remarks

I was away from home, running this tournament on a laptop in a friend's house. I found that was unable to run CGOban. This surprised me; I have been careful not to install recent versions of Java. Fortunately I had a version of CGOban.h, the "hacked client" by Petr Baudiš, creator of pachi. This worked perfectly, apart form one small problem described below. I would like to thank Petr for providing this valuable resource for KGS users, which is proving more reliable than the official client.

The friends I was with complained about the "click" sounds of stones being played, so I wanted to turn these off, without turning off the ringing sound that would be played if anyone tried to chat to me. This ought to be easy, it's the same with CGOban.h as with CGOban, it's an option in "File" - "Set Preferences". However, the "Set Preferences" window is a dialog box, and so not resizable, and with CGOban.h its height is slightly greater than that of my laptop screen. This means that its "OK" button is off the bottom of the screen, and there is no obvious way of getting it on to the screen.

Eventually I found a way: use the dialog box to disable the stone clicks; go into the Windows Control Panel, Display, and set it to Portrait; use the mousepad to manoeuvre the now-sideways-working cursor (this is harder then it sounds) to the Control Panel's "Apply" button; manoeuvre it again to CGOban.h's Set preferences "OK" button; and finally back to the Control Panel, and use more mouse manoeuvring to get the screen back to landscape.

I learned later that there's a much simpler way to rotate the display on a Windows laptop. You do Ctrl-Alt-arrowkey, where the direction of the arrow key corresponds to the desired orientation of the display.


Annual points

Players receive points for the 2014 Annual KGS Bot Championship as follows:

Aya8
HiraBot5
fuego3
oakfoam2
MCark1


Details of processor numbers, power, etc.

AyaMC
Aya, MC version, running on one machine: 980X 3.3GHz 6 cores.
Fuego19
Fuego running on a 2 x Intel Xeon X5670 Six-Core 2.93GHz (12 cores total, 24 threads).
HiraBot
HiraBot, running on a i7-3930k@3.2GHz 6 cores, 12 threads.
MCark
MC_ark, running on a Xeon E5-2687W 3.10GHz 8core HT, using two cpus.
NiceGo19N
oakfoam, running on i7-4790K. Authors: Francois van Niekerk, Detlef Schmicker.
Orego12
Orego, running on one node of a custom Linux cluster. The node has two AMD Six Core Dual Opteron 2427 2.2 GHz processors (12 cores total), 8 GB RAM, Centos Linux.