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        Arimaa >> Say Hello >> Another bot trying to survive the brutal world 
        
(Message started by: GorgeTranche on Jan 13^th, 2014, 3:04am)

Title: Another bot trying to survive the brutal world
Post by GorgeTranche on Jan 13^th, 2014, 3:04am

Hallo everybody,

after introducing myself in the last topic, its now my first bot.

I am working on the bot in the context of a bachelor thesis in computer science. The first line of code was written on the first of november. So it is fairly young :-)
Since the bot is the first thing I ever came near artificial intelligence or bot developement (other than usual stuff at University) I am not expecting it to play really strong in the near future ;) But I give my best efforts!

The biggest obstacle right now is, that I have to write a lot about everything, leaving not much time to develop :-/ ...

OK, enough:

His name is bot_Yeti.
I wrote this bot completely from scratch using Java as implementation language (Normally I would use C, but Java just makes stuff easier sometimes).

It is based on an Alpha-Beta search with move-ordering (I just used another instance of the same Alpha-Beta search for that) and transposition tables with Zobrist hashing.

The data structure relies completely on bitboards.

Otherwise there is a static evaluation function. Quiescence-Search is not implemented yet, but a very simple version (goal control ...) will probably be implemented in the near future.

Right now I am writing on getting the evaluation function to work better.
As of performance ... :D nah... not that good. It takes about 1 to 10 seconds for a 4 ply deep search and about 5 minutes for 8 recursions...

I do have some questions to you developers later, but I will post that in the bot-development section.

Again - If you have any Information, Ideas, Optimizations or anything else I would be happy to talk about it :)

So lets see where we will be in a month or so ::)

Greetings
Maurice && bot_Yeti

PS: It played its first game this morning and lost really bad amongst other because of the very unbalanced evaluation function ;)

Title: Re: Another bot trying to survive the brutal world
Post by Fritzlein on Jan 13^th, 2014, 1:16pm

Thanks for introducing us to bot_Yeti. I am jealous, because I was almost allowed to do an Arimaa bot for a parallel computing class project, but it was changed to a fluid dynamics project because the latter was more relevant to my research. I am particularly excited to learn that you will keep up your Arimaa interest after completing your undergraduate work, just as lightvector keeps updating his bachelor's project bot_sharp. Go Yeti!

Title: Re: Another bot trying to survive the brutal world
Post by GorgeTranche on Jan 14^th, 2014, 8:05am

Thank you for that warm welcome :)

With this community it is even more fun, thumbs up to you all!

Fluid dynamics sounds really interesting as well!! And it sounds like you are deep in to computer science as well. So if you ever decide to start a bot, please let me know. I am always very interested in different approaches and techniques! And with your knowledge in Arimaa and (probable) programming skills that could be worth taking a look at.

I hope no one expect bot_Yeti to challenge Sharp in the near future, but I will still keep developing if there is time :D