Thirty-fourth KGS Computer Go Tournament

Sunday January 6th 2008

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

Rules

 Formal divisionOpen division
format8-round Swiss4-round Swiss
board size9×913×13
rulesChineseChinese
komi
time13 minutes absolute28 minutes absolute

Times

The first round started at 17:00 UCT for the Formal and 17:10 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.

Formal Division   9×9

placenamewinsSOSSoDOS
1stvalkyria1983434
2ndMonteGNU63418
3rdLeelaBot53513
4thbotnoid53011
5thFudo93345
6thpagebot3303
7thMoGoBot11321
8thbreak1271

Open Division   13×13

placenamewinsSOSSoDOS
1stGNU488
2ndWeakBot50k362
3rdFudo13283
4thSimpleBot282
5thscottbot181
6thHBotSVN170
7thIdiotBot(1)(5)(2)

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

Fudo9 and Fudo13 are versions of a program by Hideki Kato, which has previously competed as 'ggmcbot'.

The event was remarkable for the number of unjustified resignations.

From now on, when I include diagrams in my reports, I will add headings and captions to them. The headings follow the usual convention, that the white player is named first.

Formal division

In round 1, Fudo9 and break both arrived late for their game, but were able to play normally.

MoGoBot1 was doing rather badly in its game against Fudo9. For move 27, it made a pointless move on the one-line; Fudo9 passed (believing, reasonably, that it could win anyway); and MoGoBot1 resigned.

In round 2, break played the worst Go I have ever seen, against MoGoBot1. Its first, and only, move was on a one-one point. Thereafter it passed, until MoGoBot1 was convinced that further moves were unnecessary, and also passed. Now the players disagreed about the status of the solitary white stone, so play resumed. Break continued to pass, while MoGoBot1 strengthened its position (while making no attempt to capture the white stone). Then, for break's move 24, it consumed its remaining ten minutes, and timed out. This was to be MoGoBot1's only win in the event.

In its round 3 game with LeelaBot, MoGoBot1 passed for its move 7, getting a very poor position as a result. After move 16, it resigned, in a lost potition.

In round 4 MoGoBot1 resigned to botnoid after move 4. Admitttedly it was in a poor position already.

In round 5 MoGoBot1 arrived late for its game against Fudo9, played poorly, and resigned, in a lost position, after move 22.

LeelaBot obtained a strong position against break, and then passed whenever it was sure that a pass was good enough to win the game. It eventually won by half a point, after 160 moves.

MonteGNU vs. break
The position after move 97.
In round 6 the MonteGNU/break game entered clean-up mode when break claimed that its four groups, all dead, were alive. MonteGNU removed three of them from the board. But after break played the marked stone, MonteGNU passed rather than make a meaningless move inside its territory (although it had done so eight moves earlier). Break also passed, and the game was scored with black's "mooonshine life" group counted as alive. [This paragraph and diagram were added to the report later, when Gunnar Farnebäck, the developer of MonteGNU, drew the incident to my attention.]

In round 7 MoGoBot1 resigned against break after move 6.

Fudo9 vs. botnoid MoGoBot1 vs. MonteGNU
The position after move 160. Black passed, and White resigned. The position after move 3. White resigned.
Round 8 provided the two most remarkable resignations of the event.

Fudo9 was White and botnoid was Black in the first position shown. Fudo9 had over seven minutes left, botnoid had 20 seconds. Botnoid, understandably, passed; and Fudo9 resigned.

In the second position shown, MoGoBot1 resigned for its second move, in a perfectly good position.


Open division

SimpleBot vs. scottbot
The position after move 80. Black passed, and White passed.

In round 1, Fudo13 did not at first appear for its game with Idiotbot, as its operator Hideki Kato was having a problem installing the Java virtual machine on its platform. When it eventually appeared, it had only eight minutes left of its initial allocation of 28 minutes. It appeared to be unaware of this, and started playing rather slowly. When its time dropped below 90 seconds it speeded up, and it speeded up again when it dropped below 50 seconds. But it had not left itself enough time for the pointless territory-filling that it likes to do, and eventually lost on time in a won position.

In the game shown to the left, both players passed in this unfinished position. By some criteria, this would be a win for Black, scottbot. However scottbot had a problem, and kept disconnecting (or crashing) and reconnecting. I assume that the players had disagreed about the result, but scottbot had not implemented the clean-up phase correctly. I had to decide how to assign a result to this game. I decided that, as the players were only failing to finish the game becasue of a failure by scottbot, and SimpleBot had done nothing wrong, I should assign the win to SimpleBot, just as I would have done if scottbot had crashed during the game.

SimpleBot vs. GNU
White has played the marked stone.
In its round 2 game against GNU, SimpleBot performed the "two-stone edge squeeze" tesuji, as shown on the right. In this position the teusuji doesn't quite work, and SimpleBot probably only played it in the hope of saving a stone that was in atari; but it looked kind of impressive.

After round 2, I noted that all the seven entrants were present, so I removed IdiotBot from the draw to avoid byes, as previously agreed with its owner Aloril.

WeakBot50k vs. scottbot
White has just played move 82.
In its round 4 game against WeakBot50k, scottbot as Black in the position shown to the left decided that it could afford to pass. WeakBot50k made a pointless move inside scottbot's territory. Scottbot then reconsidered the score, this time possibly allowing for komi, decided that its win was so not so clear, and resigned. In fact it was a secure 20 points ahead when it resigned.

This allowed WeakBot50k to finish the tournament in second place, with three wins from four games – a very good result for WeakBot50k, and a reminder that making legal moves within the time limit without resigning can be a powerful startegy.