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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> Untimed games with bots?
        
(Message started by: badhandle on Feb 3^rd, 2009, 11:22pm)

Title: Untimed games with bots?
Post by badhandle on Feb 3^rd, 2009, 11:22pm

I am very new to the game and would like to play bots untimed -- is this possible? I play during downtime at my lab while experiments are running so can be interrupted for a few minutes. I saw the Fotland download, but like the idea of playing against a variety of programs.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by Fritzlein on Feb 4^th, 2009, 6:11am

Currently, no, it is not possible to play untimed games against the bots. The bots are all provided at standard time controls that everyone uses. For the "Fast" and "Blitz" bots it could not be any other way, because the blunders that humans make under time pressure are part of the ratings of those bots.

For the P1 and P2 bots, the bot moves very quickly, but the time control is usually two minutes per move. I highly recommend that you don't get caught up in moving quickly just because the bot moves quickly. Frankly, there are very few players who are patient enough to actually think for two minutes on every move; almost everybody likes to move more quickly than that. But if you take the full two minutes to think about the position it gives you a substantial advantage over the bot and over the people who don't think that long.

If you like untimed games I recommend playing postally, and in particular I recommend you sign up for the Postal Mixer. There you will get a variety of opponents, albeit mostly humans, and you will have lots of time to analyze on each move.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by omar on Feb 5^th, 2009, 10:25pm

In the past I used to have a P3 version of Bomb that could be played postally. However, we stopped it since it was chewing up lots of compute cycles thinking for days. However, I suppose I could setup some of the CC bots to play postal games. Is there any interest for this?

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by RonWeasley on Feb 6^th, 2009, 4:41am

I would play owl games against bots.

The original message looks to me like a request for an adjournment feature. Such a feature would be vulnerable to abuse, but address that by making it apply only to unrated games. The feature could stop the clock when you leave and start it when you return.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by arimaa_master on Feb 6^th, 2009, 6:19am

on 02/05/09 at 22:25:32, omar wrote:

Heh, I think that was bomb P4 who was chewing up days (and two weeks before he was stopped). bombP3 played move in 10 minutes to 2 hours (if I am not mistaken).

I would be very interested in playing some CC bots postally - especially some new cc bots after this years WCC (e.g. Clueless 2009CC etc.).

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by Fritzlein on Feb 6^th, 2009, 6:39am

If the production of Arimaa sets draws as many people to the game room as I am hoping, then the server will not have resources for CC bots, never mind postal bots. If we set up server bots to play postally, then they certainly shouldn't be thinking for hours on every move. BombP2 could play postally, though; it would just move quickly on its turn.

In other words, I think it is a fine idea to let the opponents of fast-moving bots take as long as they like to move, but I think the server can't afford to let it bots think for a long time just because we are curious how well the bots would play if they thought longer.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by omar on Feb 9^th, 2009, 2:57pm

on 02/06/09 at 06:39:26, Fritzlein wrote:

In other words, I think it is a fine idea to let the opponents of fast-moving bots take as long as they like to move, but I think the server can't afford to let it bots think for a long time just because we are curious how well the bots would play if they thought longer.

That's right; so I won't be able to setup the CC bots for postal since they play based on the time controls. Probably the best I can do is setup some P2 bots for postal mode. This won't be any fun for the experienced players, but the new players who don't have time for an interactive game might like it.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by ocmiente on Jan 25^th, 2010, 11:18am

This reply is to an old post, but I have the same question and can't yet figure out what the right answer is with the way games are set up currently. Maybe setting up a postal game against a bot is the answer, but I could not figure out how to do that in the few minutes I've spent trying to figure that out.

What I would really like, is to be able to play a game against any bot such that the bot's time controls are different than mine. These would be unrated games.

The reason I want this is that it is more fun to play against a bot when I don't have to wait for it to make a move. I play chess against computers using this mode, and it makes the games more fun to play. It also makes it more likely that I will play in the first place, since the time commitment is less.

Specifically, I would like to play a game where the bot has 15 seconds to make a move, and I have 30. This should cause no additional server load on a per game basis. In fact, it should reduce server load, since the bot's compute time to human thinking time ratio would be lower than a game with equal time controls.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by Fritzlein on Jan 25^th, 2010, 2:39pm

on 01/25/10 at 11:18:01, ocmiente wrote:

Specifically, I would like to play a game where the bot has 15 seconds to make a move, and I have 30.

This is not far from playing BombP2, if you enforce it on yourself to move within 30 seconds. I think the time handicap feature would be nifty, but like the material handicap feature (which would also be nifty), I would rank it below a lot of other interface features that apply to standard games.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by ocmiente on Jan 30^th, 2010, 9:24am

Code:

This is not far from playing BombP2

That's just what I was looking for. It works for OpForP2 as well, but maybe not Clueless. In the one game I played against Clueless (not statistically significant, I know) Clueless took about 30 seconds per move - which is about twice as long as I would like.

So, I really enjoy playing BombP2 now - but still think the unequal time control would be a useful feature when playing bots.

Title: Re: Untimed games with bots?
Post by omar on Jan 31^st, 2010, 7:24am

Allowing games with different time controls for the two players and allowing games that can be adjourned are feature that I would like to include. However, both of them require a lot of changes on the server side, so I never get around to being able to start these projects.

If we can get enough interest in building a new server from scratch, that would be the best place to do it.