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        Arimaa >> Off Topic Discussion >> Havannah challenge match in 2012
        
(Message started by: omar on Feb 11^th, 2011, 11:11am)

Title: Havannah challenge match in 2012
Post by omar on Feb 11^th, 2011, 11:11am

When I announced the Arimaa challenge in the fall of 2002 I was not aware that Christian Freeling had announced the Havannah challenge earlier that year. I later discovered Havannah and the challenge though Christian's web site

http://www.mindsports.nl/

The Havannah challenge offers a 1000 euro prize to any program that can beat Christian Freeling in even one game of a 10 game series of base 10 Havannah. The offer expires around middle of 2012.

I don't know what hardware the programs can use. Also I am guessing that Christian plans to play a 10 game series against any program that challenges him and not just the best one. Also I don't know what kind of time controls the games will use. It would be good if the details of the challenge match were clarified a bit more.

For many years no developers dared to take on the challenge. However, with the advent of Monte Carlo working so well for Go, I think developers have become encouraged to try this approach on Havannah. There are now several Havannah playing bots going for the challenge and they have been appearing at ICGA sponsored tournaments.
http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/icga/game.php?id=37

I've played the winning bot Castro on http://littlegolem.net/ and it can beat me if I am not careful about ring threats. But if I play carefully, I am able to beat it. It is certainly not a trivial bot to beat, I would put it at about the level of Bomb2005 in Arimaa. It will be interesting to see how these bots progress and how the Havannah challenge turns out. I will of course be rooting for Christian to defend humanity against the silicon beasts :-)

Christian feel free to tell a more about the challenge and keep us updated on the progress.

Title: Re: Havannah challenge match in 2012
Post by christianF on Feb 12^th, 2011, 8:41am

The challenge was made in 2002 when MC evaluation was a vague notion. Fortunately it turned out to be a better approach than the traditional evaluation functions.

The match will be real time, base-10, no swap. The games club Fanatic at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, has volunteered to provide a game room with the proper connections. The time per game per player isn't definitely set, but say an hour for 30 moves and 30 seconds per move or something thereabouts.

Castro, Deep Fork, and now an improved Ring von Fehler, they're playing a mean game on smaller boards now, so it should be an interesting match.

At the hex/havannah forum at LG you can find some interesting comments by people more qualified to discuss the state of the art regarding program architecture than I am.