This is not an official KGS page.

Eighth KGS Computer Go Tournament

Sunday November 6th, 2005

These results also appear on official KGS pages: Formal Division, Open Division which link to all the game records.

Rules

9x9 board
Chinese rules, komi 7½
13 minutes each absolute time

Format

Swiss

Times

The first round started at 19:00 GMT for the Formal and 19:10 for the Open division, subsequent rounds started at thirty-minute intervals.

Results

The tournament was again held in two divisions, Formal and Open, with more restrictive entry conditions for the Formal division. Essentially, an entrant to the Formal division must not contain move-generating code used by any other such entrant, and its author's real identity must be known. A program may enter both divisions simultaneously (though it will have to use different names for each).

Formal Division

placenamewinsSOSSoDOS
1stDar5163729
2ndGNU63424
3rdAyaBot53317
4thIndigoBot53014
viking553014
6thExBot53013
7thbotnoid43212
8thCrazyStone43111
9thMango42710
10thtlsBot33510
11thfirstgo1340

Open Division

placenamewinsSOSSoDOS
1sttlsBotExp182727
2ndDariush63115
3rdbotnoidx4337
4thantbot4317
5thMango21381
6thSimpleBot1321

The "real" names of the bots listed above, and of their programmers, are listed here: programs which have registered for KGS Computer Go Tournaments.

Description

In this tournament, we welcomed two new programs. Martin Müller's "Explorer" played as "ExBot", and Edward de Grijs's "FirstGo" played as "firstgo". Bruno Bouzy's "Indigo", playing as "indigoBot", moved to the Formal division.

There were a total of 17 bots, from 13 programmers or teams. Dar51/Dariush, Mango/Mango2, tlsBot/tlsBotExp1, and botnoid/botnoidx are pairs of bots incorporating the same, or related, engines, and playing in different divisions.

Of the 64 games played, 21 ended in arguments between the bots, "those stones are dead" "no alive" "dead" "alive" "dead" "alive" "dead" ... As tournament organiser, I had to score these myself, assign the result, and ask an admin (thanks, glue) to kill the game so as to free up the bots to play in the next round.. For 9x9 games, I am able to count accurately, so this is merely tedious. For 19x19 games, there is a risk that I will get it wrong, which is worrying. Fortunately, the next version of the KGS server, to be installed early next year, will enhance the kgsGtp protocol so as to provide a way of avoiding this problem. Initially, I plan to encourage support for these enhancements, but to continue to manually score games where the bots argue endlessly. Once almost all bots support the enhanced protocol correctly, I shall enforce its use, and assign a loss to both bots if they argue endlessly.

Games which end in this way, with me assigning a result, are shown on the KGS pages as "Forf.", meaning "forfeited". The game record is not available from the KGS database for six months. I was aware of this problem a month or more ago, and had decided to save such games onto my own hard disk before terminating them. Unfortunately, I forgot to do so until round 3 had started, and also forgot one round 7 game. However the admin 'glue' has generously provided all the missing game records. So all records of the "forfeited" games are now available below.

Formal division

Two of the srongest contenders were, perhaps, hampered by their use of time. AyaBot played slowly, losing two of its games on time; its only other loss was to GNU (GNU Go). GNU played fast, losing to Dar51 (it used less than a minute in this game) and to CrazyStone. Dar51 (Dariush), by Frédéric Boissac and Eric Marchand, was the winner, with six wins from eight games, ahead of GNU on SOS.

In the round 3 game between Mango and botnoid, when the last dame was filled, Mango was half a point behind. However it passed repeatedly as botnoid played inside its territory, and allowed botnoid to kill all its stones.

Open division

Michał Bażyński and Karol Golab's tlsBot had only two wins (one of them against Dar51, the division winner) and a bye in the Formal division. But it was undefeated playing in the Open division as tlsBotExp1, including two wins there against Dariush.

In the round 2 game between botnoidx and Mango2, when the last dame was filled, Mango2 was once more half a point behind. However it passed repeatedly as botnoidx played inside its territory, and allowed botnoid to kill half of its stones, increasing its losing margin to 52½. I don't know whether Mango/Mango2 does this because it can count and knows that it has lost, or for some other reason. If it is because it knows it has lost, it might be better if it would resign.

In round 7, Mango2 turned up for its game, but never made a move. Eventually its opponent won on time. This happened again in round 8.

Forfeited games

Here is a complete list of the "forfeited" games. You can download any game listed here by clicking on it. Other game records are available from the KGS pages: Formal Division and Open Division.

roundFormal divisionOpen division
1Dar51-CrazyStone.sgf
ExBot-botnoid.sgf
tlsBot-Mango.sgf
Mango2-tlsBotExp1.sgf
2botnoid-AyaBot.sgf
CrazyStone-mango.sgf
 
3 botnoidx-antbot.sgf
SimpleBot-Mango2.sgf
4botnoid-tlsBot.sgf
CrazyStone-firstgo.sgf
antbot-Mango2.sgf
botnoidx-tlsBotExp1.sgf
5CrazyStone-botnoid.sgf
Mango-firstgo.sgf
botnoidx-SimpleBot.sgf
Mango2-Dariush.sgf
6AyaBot-firstgo.sgf
indigoBot-Mango.sgf
 
7botnoid-Dar51.sgfantbot-SimpleBot.sgf
8 SimpleBot-botnoidx.sgf