Arimaa Forum - Print Page


    
      
        Arimaa Forum
        (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi)
      

        Arimaa >> Events >> Generated code of championship bots
        
(Message started by: aaaa on Jan 30^th, 2010, 1:21pm)

Title: Generated code of championship bots
Post by aaaa on Jan 30^th, 2010, 1:21pm

From the rules for the Computer World Championship (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wcc/2010/rules.html) (with emphasis added):

Quote:

[...]the programs submitted for the championship tournament will be made available for others to play against in the public Arimaa gameroom after the challenge match is over. Thus the programs and players participating in the following years can be improved against the best programs of the previous years. Participants who submit programs that are limited after some time, some games or limited in any manner will not be allowed to participate in following years and must return any prize awarded.

I know that the intention here is to disallow the type of limitation one may experience with shareware that cripples its functionality after a trial period, but it does bring up the question of how architecture-restricted the executables are allowed to be. Much has been made of the opportunity for developers to take advantage of the 64-bit architecture to speed up their bitboard-based engines and one can expect that future hardware will continue to remain backwards compatible in this respect. But what if, in an otherwise good-faith attempt to squeeze out a bit more efficiency, the developer supplies an executable that is specific to the hardware in use in the then current championship? Those could end up being incompatible with any new server hardware, which would go against the intent here of having the bots available for future play indefinitely. It would be nice to hear some clarity on this.

Title: Re: Generated code of championship bots
Post by omar on Jan 31^st, 2010, 5:59am

on 01/30/10 at 13:21:07, aaaa wrote:

From the rules for the Computer World Championship (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wcc/2010/rules.html) (with emphasis added):
I know that the intention here is to disallow the type of limitation one may experience with shareware that cripples its functionality after a trial period, but it does bring up the question of how architecture-restricted the executables are allowed to be. Much has been made of the opportunity for developers to take advantage of the 64-bit architecture to speed up their bitboard-based engines and one can expect that future hardware will continue to remain backwards compatible in this respect. But what if, in an otherwise good-faith attempt to squeeze out a bit more efficiency, the developer supplies an executable that is specific to the hardware in use in the then current championship? Those could end up being incompatible with any new server hardware, which would go against the intent here of having the bots available for future play indefinitely. It would be nice to hear some clarity on this.

Well the intent of the Arimaa challenge is to encourage algorithmic advances as opposed to hardware advances, so I wouldn't want to encourage the bot developers to tightly couple their code to the current hardware configuration. If you use the standard libraries provided by the OS and language you shouldn't run into any problems with the executable being tied to the hardware configuration.