Nineteenth KGS Computer Go Tournament

Sunday October 8th, 2006

Rules

Format

Formal division: ten-round Swiss.
Open division: six-round Swiss.

Times

The first round started at 09:00 UTC for the Formal and 09:10 for the Open division.

Results

As usual, the tournament was held in two divisions, Formal and Open, with more restrictive entry conditions for the Formal division.

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

General remarks

Changes which I should have announced

This was the first "real" computer Go tournament to be held on the new KGS server. Two test tournaments had previously been held, and shown up various problems, which had been fixed. However, there are two very significant changes, which I shlould have announced to entrants to these events. I apologise for not doing so before this one:

The server is at a new address, goserver.gokgs.com (the old one was goserver.igoweb.org).

Clean-up at the end of the game is now supported, indeed, it is enforced.

The new address means that a bot's configuration file needs to be changed to allow it to play on the new server.

I had, long ago, planned to introduce clean-up gradually, and only enforce it once most bots were supporting it. However, with the server enforcing it, and at least some bots already supporting it correctly, its use is now compulsory. The way it works is this. After two consecutive passes, each bot states which groups it thinks are alive. If they agree, the game is scored on the basis of their agreement. If they differ, the server asks them to resume play, which continues until another two (?) consecutive passes. The game is now scored with all stones still on the board counted as alive.

My failure to announce these changes inconvenienced several entrants. One tried to connect to the old server, and missed the early rounds. Others were surprised to see their opponents' one-liberty groups scored as alive. I apologise for all this.

Problem with joining a room

Some users have reported a problem with getting a bot to play in a specific room. This is a new problem with CGoban3. To get a bot to play in a specific room it may be necessary first to log in yourself using your bot's name and password, go into the room yourself, and then log off and re-launch the bot. The problem seems to arise if the bot has not previously played in that room.

I have had many emails from someone whose KGS account is 'Kakashisa'. He has wanted to enter what he calls "his" bot, 'KaiouBot', to enter the last two events. I have found communication with him difficult. His English is poor, his native language is Hebrew. His mail service appends some junk to all the emails he sends, which causes them to go into my spam bucket. His bot is a copy of GNU Go.

My policy is to allow only one copy of GNU Go (and of any other program) to play in each division. Further versions may play in the Open division if, like 'DrunkenGnu', they have what I judge to be significant modifications.

In this tournament, I did not know if the GNU Go team planned to enter the Open division. Five minutes before the deadline for entries, when they had not done so, I entered 'KaiouBot'; but its owner was unaware of this, so it missed the early rounds. 'KaiouBot' should not expect to be allowed to play in these events in future, unless no other version of GNU Go applies.

It would be very helpful for me if there were a GNU Go spokesman I could talk to about such things. But I see that it is in the nature of the GNU project that this is an unreasonable thing for me to expect.

Formal division

In round 1 AyaBot was missing. I had omitted to inform its owner of the change of address of the server.

In round 2 AyaBot was still missing. It was drawn as black against Orego. Orego joined the game, but after a while, when nothing had happened, it left it. As it happens, Orego was eventually assigned the win when AyaBot timed out. But if AyaBot has joined this game after Orego's departure, and made a move, what would have happened? I do not know if the server would somehow have told Orego to get back to its game (and I don't know why it had left).

Also in round 2, firstGo tried to resign its game against MoGoBot, and was disconnected by the server, possibly because it spelled the word "RESIGN" in upper-case. It was not revived until round 7.

In round 10 MoGoBot (black) made a surprising mistake against Magnus Persson's Valkyria, in this position. There is a semeai at the top left between two groups, each with three liberties: if black fills any of white's three liberties, black will win the semeai and the game. But MoGoBot instead played at the marked point, and Valkyria fought the semeai correctly, to win the game.

Open division

MoGoBot13 won all its games – it was the only player not to get a bye – winning the division convincingly.

Forfeited games

Thanks to the enforced game-end protocol, there were none of these.