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        Arimaa >> Bot Development >> New Speedy Released
        
(Message started by: fotland on Sep 1st, 2003, 4:40pm)
Title: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 1st, 2003, 4:40pm
A new speedy is on-line Sept 1.  It fixes problems identified in the last gmae against naveed.

David
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 4th, 2003, 12:39pm
New version 9/4 10:30 am.

Fixes problem that caused loss on time due to repeated position.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 5th, 2003, 12:19am
9/4 10:30 PM

Fixed bug that caused loss on time in jdb game when the winning move was less than 4 steps.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 7th, 2003, 10:54pm
9/7: 8:50 PM (california time)

Fixed the lose on time bug again (hopefully correctly this time).

Rewrote the trap evaluation.  Style of play around traps should be different.  Should avoid camel getting stuck by enemy trap.  Should avoid using strng pieces to trap enemy weak piece on a trap.  The evaluation constants are very, very different, so it might play better, or it might play worse :)

Fixed a goal evaluation bug that let Claude sneak a pawn through when he was behind in material.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 9th, 2003, 12:41am
New version 9/8, 10:35 PM

Fixed a few bugs in trap evaluation from today's games.  Naveed's strategy is very hard to counter with
speedy's search depth.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 10th, 2003, 12:54am
9/9 11:00 PM

Fixed a couple of bugs in the new trap eval.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 11th, 2003, 1:27am
9/10: 11:30 pm

Added a trap search extension.  Might make it weaker or stronger, who knows?
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 12th, 2003, 1:07am
9/11

Fixed a bug that made it advance weak pieces only when gold.  This is why it has lost more games as
gold recently.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by 99of9 on Sep 12th, 2003, 5:47pm
speedy seems to be improving his game!
congratulations.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 12th, 2003, 9:27pm
9/12, 7:30 pm

Another big change to the trap evaluator.  We'll see if it helps.

Thanks everyone for all the games.  They help me a lot to find bugs.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 13th, 2003, 9:29pm
9/13

Improved time control.  You will see more variation in the time used per move.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 16th, 2003, 1:53am
9/15

Another rewrite of the trap evaluation.  Should be much more difficult to drag a piece to a trap and pin it there.

Please give it a try so I can find the bugs in the new code :)
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 16th, 2003, 9:41am
Last night I accidentally set the time control to 0 seconds, so speedy was doing very little searching.

Same version this morning, but with the correct 20 second time control.  It probably has some major bugs as well, since I was just as tired when I was writing the code as when I was setting the time control  :'(
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 17th, 2003, 1:58am
Fixed some bugs and made it more agressive.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 17th, 2003, 1:02pm
Fixed some bugs
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 19th, 2003, 2:24am
Some bug fixes from game with occam.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 21st, 2003, 2:47pm
Many bug fixes.  Some tuning.  A big change to the advanced rabbit evaluation to try to prevent a strongly guarded rabbit from winning.  This change is very speculative, and might make overall play worse.  We will have to see.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 22nd, 2003, 1:21am
Another one.  Fixed a problem that showed up in the game with occam today.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 23rd, 2003, 1:20am
Some bug fixes.  Still plenty of bad moves to get rid of :)  It's still throwing pieces away sometimes for no good reason.

Nice win today by jdb.  When there are not many pieces left its hard to stop all the rabbits, even when ahead on material.  Perhaps trading material when ahead is not a good idea.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 28th, 2003, 2:10am
Search enhancements - it searches deeper now.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Sep 29th, 2003, 2:03am
Fixed some bugs in search and evaluation.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 2nd, 2003, 1:57am
fixed problems from last game with naveed
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by omar on Oct 5th, 2003, 10:44pm
Speedys been off-line a lot lately David. You must
be making some major enhancments. It's making me
nervious :-)

Omar
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 6th, 2003, 12:46am
There is a new one today.  I finished a referee to let me play old and new versions of speedy against each other, and that found plenty of bugs to keep me busy.

No major changes, just many bug fixes in the trap and goal evaluators.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 9th, 2003, 2:24pm
Big changes to the advances rabbit evaluation to prevent people from winning when they are way behind in material.

Fixed some bugs in the trap evaluation.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 12th, 2003, 1:25am
Minor changes and bug fixes.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 20th, 2003, 1:12am
Just some bug fixes
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 25th, 2003, 8:34pm
Many bug fixes and minor enhancements.  Plays differently, and searches more slowly, but is not clearly stronger.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 28th, 2003, 1:06am
Fixed a bug that caused some bad moves in the last game against naveed, and enhanced the trap evaluation a little.  This version does much better against old versions of speedy, but that might say nothing about how well it plays against people.

The search is getting much slower as the evaluation gets more complex.  In my test positions, it has slowed down from 305K nps to 235K nps in the last month.  The average search depth has gone down from 11.1 to 10.6 steps.  But it does seem stronger than it was a month ago.

I want to thank Naveed for giving me so many good games to look at.  I wish other people would also play speedy so I don't tune it too much to one style.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Oct 31st, 2003, 10:00am
Fixed a big search bug that was causing it to prune many good moves.  Hopefully this will make it much stronger :)

Fixed a goal eval bug that affected rabbits advancing on the edge of the board.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 1st, 2003, 4:56pm
I'll be out of town for almost 2 weeks, so speedy will be off-line until I get back.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 11th, 2003, 10:34pm
New speedy with lots of improvements to the trap evaluation.  I can't beat it, and it did well in one game against occam, so here it is :)
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 14th, 2003, 1:35am
Fixed bug in trap evaluation that kept it from protecting upper right trap in last game against belbo.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 17th, 2003, 11:51pm
Fixed many goal evaluation bugs and search bugs.  
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by 99of9 on Nov 20th, 2003, 7:57am
I think you should switch speedy's time control over to the one required to qualify for the Bot Challenge.  Even if you keep it playing in 30 seconds or whatever, it's worth doing so speedy gets enough games in to qualify.

99
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 22nd, 2003, 1:48pm
Thanks for the suggestion.  I'll have to have bomb play more as well.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by 99of9 on Nov 22nd, 2003, 4:30pm
Either way i guess.  Only one needs to qualify, but if you want to see how good bomb is at the moment, it might be interesting to have it on.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 22nd, 2003, 11:05pm
Bomb should stronger.  They are the same program, just with different time limits on the search (20 seconds and 3 minutes).
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by clauchau on Nov 23rd, 2003, 1:14pm
What game would Bomb play against Bomb with a day per move?
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 24th, 2003, 1:20am
Don't know.  At some point deeper searches can't overcome flaws in the evaluation function.  And if there is a bug in the evaluation, a bigger search makes it more likely to turn up.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 24th, 2003, 1:22am
New Speedy today.  The faster goal search is partially implemented.  A few positions search 3 ply goal in under a second, but most are about 2 or 3 seconds, and a few are still over 10 seconds.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Nov 28th, 2003, 4:12pm
The fast goal search is done, except for bug fixes and tuning.  For 3-ply goals, it finds 1/3 in under 0.5 second, and 95% under 5 seconds.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Dec 1st, 2003, 2:18am
Still working on the goal search.  50% under 0.5 second now and over 75% under 1 second.  It can find some 5-ply forced goals in about 1.5 minutes, but I don't have many examples.  In real games there is usually a defender error at 4 ply from the goal, so the position 5 ply from the goal is not a forced 5-ply win.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Dec 6th, 2003, 6:27pm
Done with goal search for now.  It still has some minor problems, but averages about 0.8 seconds to find a 3-ply forced goal.

I found a couple of search bugs that might account for bomb's recent bad play.

Now I'll go back to the trap and pin evaluations.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Dec 24th, 2003, 11:08am
Many big changes in this one.

I finally impemented a quiescence search, so it only goes full width to 8 or 9 steps, but it beats the old version 75%.

Lots of evaluation changes around pinning, avoiding pins, and escaping pins.

As black it opens with its camel to the side.

This is the code with all windows dependencies removed, so it's ready to port to Linux.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Dec 31st, 2003, 12:47pm
This is the speedy version of the bomb that will be in the competition.  But you have to play it at the same time limit it's using.  I think it will be unbeatable at this speed.

I fixed some bugs in the quiescence search, and made some other minor improvements.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Dec 31st, 2003, 2:14pm
This speedy is running on an old 700 MHz machine without much memory.  The old speedy was running on my 2.4 GHz machine.  So this speedy is is getting less than 1/3 of the time of the old speedy, and is typically only searching 7 steps full width.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by clauchau on Jan 1st, 2004, 8:02am
Great move and great work you put in there. Thanks.

It's cool to play Speedy and it had been a long time.  Today it definitely was stronger than me at 30s per move.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Jan 1st, 2004, 1:50pm
It's known from chess that the computer's rating is higher at fast games than slow games, so I expected that with equal time and faster games, that speedy would rank higher.

I'm out of town for a few days, so speedy is back on the fast computer until I get back.  That should make it a little stronger.

If anyone notices some general weaknesses it has, please let me know.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by 99of9 on Jan 4th, 2004, 4:44pm
David, if you haven't already, you might like to take a look at the game Jarrausi played most recently against speedy (there are some comments attached).  Basically there's a repetition detection error in speedy somewhere.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Jan 4th, 2004, 10:54pm

on 01/04/04 at 16:44:41, 99of9 wrote:
David, if you haven't already, you might like to take a look at the game Jarrausi played most recently against speedy (there are some comments attached).  Basically there's a repetition detection error in speedy somewhere.


Thanks.  I noticed it, but it was too late to change it right before submission.  My board hash includes the side to move, so I need a separate hash for the repetiion rule from the one that I use for the transposition table.
Title: Re: New Speedy Released
Post by fotland on Jan 4th, 2004, 10:57pm
Speedy and Bomb will be off-line until after the human world championship match.  Since I am not allowed to change the program until then, it seems fair to avoid additional games with the human challenger.  He could learn from those games, but I would not be allowed to put anything I learned into the program.

Bomb will be available after the match is over.

I'm going to switch back to working on computer go for a while.

Thanks for all the games you all played that helped me improve the program.

-David


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