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Tenth KGS Computer Go Tournament

Sunday January 9th, 2006

Rules

Format

Both Swiss

Times

The first round started at 17:00 GMT for the Formal and 17:10 for the Open division, subsequent rounds started at twenty-minute intervals and thirty-minute intervals respectively.

Results

As usual, the tournament was again held in two divisions, Formal and Open, with more restrictive entry conditions for the Formal division. As an innovation, the two divisions used different board sizes – this should allow more flexibility to bots that prefer a particular board size.

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

Six games ended in arguments between the bots. Records of five of these "forfeited" games are available below. The sixth should be available from the KGS archives.

Formal division

In round 2, viking5 resigned a won position to tlsBot, after filling all the dame. It was confused by a seki.

In round 3, GNU found an impressive move in this position. I present it as a problem, "White to play and kill at least three stones". Few human kyu players would see this, particularly in a fast game; but GNU read it correctly.

In round 5, GNU missed the start of its game, because it had started to play against a human opponent. Fortunately its operator was able to resign this human game for it, so it was able to start its tournament game with tlsBot, two minutes late. Operators of bots should always include both the lines
open=f
tournament=t
in their configuration files, when they are to play in a tournament.

At the start of round 6, GNU and Crazystone were sharing the lead with four points each (GNU had lost a game to AyaBot, and CrazyStone had lost a game to viking5). The observers naturally expected them to be drawn against each other, so as to establish a winner. It was disappointing to see them drawn against the low-scoring ExBot and GoWind.

However it seemed that there would be a clear winner, when GNU won easily against ExBot, and CrazyStone achieved a lost position against GoWind. But GoWind gratuitously destroyed one of its own eyes with move 50, allowing CrazyStone to win, equalling GNU on wins.

With the use of SOS (Sum of Opponents' Scores) as a tie-break, CrazyStone was declared the winner.

This raises several questions.

• With nine bots and six fast rounds, wouldn't it make more sense to use round robin instead of Swiss?
  Yes. But I want to keep entry open up to two minutes before the tournament starts. Deleting the Swiss tournament, creating a Round Robin tournament, and entering the correct players for it, takes 10 or 15 minutes to do reliably.
• Shouldn't the algorithm that does the pairing in a Swiss, try to pair the strongest players against each other? Why was GNU drawn against ExBot instead of CrazyStone in round 6?
  Maybe wms can explain this.
• At the end of the tournament, CrazyStone had five wins and one loss. GNU had four wins, one loss, and one bye. This looks like a better result for CrazyStone, without resorting to tiebreak. Should a bye really score as 1 and not ½?
  I believe that this is deliberate, but I do not understand the reasoning.

Open division

TheGNUGo was the undefeated winner. Dariush beat all its opponents except TheGNUGo. StoneCrazy, a copy of Rémi Coulom's CrazyStone, did worse than CrazyStone, with two wins, a bye, and three losses (one of them on time in a won position).

Forfeited games

Here is a list of the "forfeited" games. You can download any game listed here by clicking on it. Other game records (except GoWind-NeuroGo, from round 5 of the Formal division) are available from the KGS pages: Formal Division. Open Division.

StoneCrazy-HouseBot.sgf
HouseBot-IdiotBot.sgf
WeakBot50k-HouseBot.sgf
HouseBot-SimpleBot.sgf
TheGNUGo-HouseBot.sgf