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Topic: It's good to see bots being improved (Read 4533 times) |
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Swynndla
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It's good to see bots being improved
« on: Oct 16th, 2011, 12:17am » |
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I'm looking forward to see the line-up of bots for the next bot champs. From what it seems to me:
lightvector has made sharp parallel, fixed some bugs, and he's hinted at several other speed improvements that could be done.
tize been busy testing marwin with various ideas.
rbarreira is doing a complete rewrite of briareus's eval function.
ingwa is actively improving badger.
What are others doing? I'd be interested to hear (and also hear from the four above) ... It's exciting as sharp has set the stage for other developers to try new things.
Also, is there a page giving a brief description of each bot?
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lightvector
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #1 on: Oct 17th, 2011, 11:06pm » |
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Whew, I only just got around to starting to work on sharp again. Since I began working two months ago and gotten involved in a few things, I've had essentially no time for anything Arimaa-related, whether it be coding, following the mob/gang game, etc. I'm starting to have time again, and hopefully it will stay that way.
During the summer, I did parallelize sharp, but the bot generally remains primitive in many ways. For instance, I only just now got around to testing a 'killer move' heuristic for the first time, which is one of way too many things that I should have tested a long time ago. The number of such things that I'll be able to try will depend heavily on how much time I can find. Judging by the last 2 months, it won't nearly be as much as I'd like...
So, that's the short summary over here. It looks like 2012's going to be fun!
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Swynndla
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #2 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 1:07am » |
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Thanks for the update lightvector. It's exciting to know that sharp is being improved! So are you saying that sharp didn't use killer moves at all, or just that you hadn't tested one of the heuristics?
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lightvector
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #3 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 10:49pm » |
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Sharp did not use killer moves at all.
I'm trying it right now. So far, looks like it's averaging close to a 30% speedup on a set of test positions. Much of this on the tail end, with the greatest speedups occurring disproportionately frequently among the positions that are the slowest and hardest to search deeply. But the median search improved too (10%). All in all, an excellent gain for such a simple change.
There's still some more low-hanging fruits left after this, each of which is likely (but not guaranteed, of course) to result in small gains.
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Fritzlein
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #4 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 10:59pm » |
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Thanks for the updates, lightvector. Swynndla isn't the only one who is curious how the reigning champion bot is being improved.
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rbarreira
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #5 on: Oct 19th, 2011, 3:33am » |
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Yes, I am doing a (much needed) complete rewrite of briareus's eval, and also adding missing capture/goal patterns some of which caused problems in the 2011 CC.
I also did a bunch of minor improvements such as disallowing reversible moves.
Perhaps more interestingly I made a quick & dirty hack to allow briareus to run simultaneously on several PCs cooperating on a search (basically a cluster version of the bot). It worked rather well on an actual cluster, but when I tried it on Amazon EC2 I found that their communication latency between machines sucks, which killed performance (even with the "cluster compute" instance which is supposed to have high-performance IO... it's possible I did something wrong with the setup).
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| « Last Edit: Oct 19th, 2011, 6:22am by rbarreira » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #6 on: Oct 19th, 2011, 8:02am » |
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Thanks, rbarriera. Also I have enjoyed your chatroom discussions with ingwa and Migi. Although I am seldom in the chatroom, I always read the archives with interest before the week is out.
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tize
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #7 on: Oct 24th, 2011, 4:46pm » |
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This year has been mostly focused on the search, by adding some kind of late move reduction, adding new static pruners and some search extensions.
As far as strategy goes there has been some tunings and small things like making the rabbits more aggresive in the end of the games.
Of course theres also the normal chunk of bug fixes.
With the bots being improved (or at least changed, I don't know if Marwin has got any stronger by the changes) it looks like we are up for an interesting tournament, and it's still almost 4 months of changes left...
It's good to hear that Sharp now will use all the processing power available. That tells us that the next champion will be stronger than the previous, hopefully Sharp will not be to lonely at it's new playing strength.
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Fritzlein
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #8 on: Nov 11th, 2011, 7:31pm » |
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on Oct 24th, 2011, 4:46pm, tize wrote:| It's good to hear that Sharp now will use all the processing power available. That tells us that the next champion will be stronger than the previous, hopefully Sharp will not be to lonely at it's new playing strength. |
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I hope at least that sharp at its new level has some human company!  Thanks for the progress update on marwin.
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Swynndla
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #9 on: Nov 29th, 2011, 7:28pm » |
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I'm a bit late in saying it, but when I saw Marwin play the other week, I was amazed at how strong it is now, and what advanced strategies it seems to be able to do now (like attacking with the camel - I'd guess not an easy thing to get right).
on Oct 24th, 2011, 4:46pm, tize wrote:This year has been mostly focused on the search, by adding some kind of late move reduction, adding new static pruners and some search extensions.
As far as strategy goes there has been some tunings and small things like making the rabbits more aggresive in the end of the games. |
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... what ever you did seems to be working!
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Fritzlein
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #10 on: Dec 10th, 2011, 2:26pm » |
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on Nov 29th, 2011, 7:28pm, Swynndla wrote:I'm a bit late in saying it, but when I saw Marwin play the other week, I was amazed at how strong it is now, and what advanced strategies it seems to be able to do now (like attacking with the camel - I'd guess not an easy thing to get right).
... what ever you did seems to be working! |
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From playing marwin, and from losing two of seven, I second the perception of increased strength. If you want marwin to sharpen its claws against me some more, just make it available over the coming weeks when I am on vacation from school.
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froody
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #11 on: Dec 10th, 2011, 10:33pm » |
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http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/Bot_List
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| « Last Edit: Dec 12th, 2011, 11:21pm by froody » |
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“Arimaa holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer”
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tize
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #12 on: Dec 12th, 2011, 2:58pm » |
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on Dec 10th, 2011, 2:26pm, Fritzlein wrote:
If you want marwin to sharpen its claws against me some more, just make it available over the coming weeks when I am on vacation from school. |
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I definitly want that. But it will have to wait a few days as I'm close to finish a small addition to the rabbit handling code that I want to get in before testing goes past the bots.
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Fritzlein
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #13 on: Dec 12th, 2011, 3:03pm » |
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on Dec 10th, 2011, 2:26pm, Fritzlein wrote:| From playing marwin, and from losing two of seven, I second the perception of increased strength. |
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A more persuasive hypothesis may be that I am getting worse. I just lost nine of twelve to Sharp2011Blitz. (No, this isn't my tactic to get out of defending the Arimaa Challenge this year; I just couldn't compete.  )
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| « Last Edit: Dec 12th, 2011, 3:03pm by Fritzlein » |
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leo
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Re: It's good to see bots being improved
« Reply #14 on: Dec 12th, 2011, 4:11pm » |
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@Fritzlein: But those were blitz games, and computers always win at shoot-them-ups (or rather would always win, if they weren't nerfed down  )
(OK, I know my argument is only half-valid)
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| « Last Edit: Dec 12th, 2011, 4:14pm by leo » |
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