Thirty-first KGS Computer Go Tournament

Sunday October 7th, 2007

Rules

Times

The first round started at 08:00 UCT for the Formal and 08:10 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

There was a record number of entrants for one of these events. 24 players registered, and 23 of them actually played – I removed hb04 from the draw to make the number in the Open division even.

These included seven bots which have never taken part in one of these events before, four of them choosing to enter both divisions.

• AyaMC, also playing as AyaMC2, is by Hiroshi Yamashita. It is a version of his Aya rewritten to use an MC algorithm (UCT, I assume, judging from its success).
• GoTraxx is by Philipp Garcia. It plays on CGOS. It uses Alpha-Beta search, with various domain-specific knowledge optimisations.
• greenpeep is by Christopher Rosin. It uses UCT guided by patterns. It was one of the strongest of the new programs, and finished in second place, behind MoGoBot1.
• Kago, also playing as Kago2, is by Wang, Rizhong (Karl Wang). He is a Chinese Ph.D. student whose research topic is computer Go.
• pagebot, also playing as scottbot, is by Peter Christopher.
• Progo, whose real name is ProGo/Ka, is by Italian programmer Gian-Carlo Pascutto. It was one of the strongest of the new programs. Pascutto is the writer of chess program Deep Sjeng.
• StoneLord, also playing as LordStone, is by John Nixon, a British programmer. It uses single-ply Monte-Carlo.

Formal division

In round 4 pagebot obtained a won position against GoTraxx, with all the dame filled and 25 seconds left on its clock. However it timed out before the game end. I hope it will be easy to imrove its time management before the next tournament.

In round 6 StoneLord killed all of Kago2's groups. After both players passed, they disputed the status of all of Kago2's groups, which had one liberty each. Play was resumed, and for a while StoneLord removed dead groups from the board while Kago2 made meaningless moves. Then Kago2 stopped responding, and timed out.

Open division

In its round 1 game with WeakBot50k, HBotSVN had achieved a convincingly won position with all the dame filled and 25 seconds left on its clock when both players passed. HBotSVN does not support the procedure for making claims about which groups are alive, so the kgsGtp client did this on its behalf and claimed that HBotSVN's dead stones were alive; and the game was resumed. WeakBot50k made a move, and HBotSVN, which has a time management bug at the start of the clean-up phase, did not respond or pass but timed out.

In the round 3 game between LordStone and Kago, there was a conclusion very similar to the one described above when their Formal-division versions met. After both players passed, Kago disputed the status of all its groups, which had one liberty each. Play resumed, LordStone captured a group, and Kago, which at this point had 40 minutes still on its clock, did nothing and timed out.

In round 4 Kago was meant to play against HBotSVN, but had vanished from the server.