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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> Beating all bots availible
        
(Message started by: 722caasi on Apr 27^th, 2011, 8:45pm)

Title: Beating all bots availible
Post by 722caasi on Apr 27^th, 2011, 8:45pm

I have now beaten all of the available bots except the ones that take a full two minutes per move (CC) and therefore take hours to play. Could we have a page for the people who have beaten all of the non-CC bots? Sort of a halfway point between the bot ladder and all of the available bots?
Thanks, 722caasi

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by ginrunner on Apr 27^th, 2011, 10:17pm

I can't remember who said it but beating the full ladder doesn't just show skill, it shows determination. I don't believe C&G has beaten all of the bots on the ladder but no one here can argue that he doesn't have skill. Beating the full ladder is an accomplishment more than just being good at a game imo.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 28^th, 2011, 12:18am

I agree. If there is going to be an award for beating all the bots except for the bots we consider too boring to be worth playing, then I should have won that award already. ;D Once you have beaten the standard bot ladder, you are obviously capable of beating the full ladder. The listing of those who have beaten every bot available just shows who is sufficiently crazy to have done it. And if we are giving official recognition to insanity, then let it be for total insanity. ;)

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by 722caasi on Apr 28^th, 2011, 12:37am

What I am endorsing is a record of achievement with less insanity. The bot ladder ends in 2008, doesn't have an bot with a rating in the 2000's, and doesn't include the lightning bot. I think the bot ladder page is too easy, so I want a page for achievement, but not insanity.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by JimmSlimm on Apr 28^th, 2011, 6:47am

Little off-topic, but what does CC stand for?

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Nombril on Apr 28^th, 2011, 6:59am

Computer Championship

The time controls are sometimes 2min, sometimes 3min, depending on the time controls in effect that year.

The hardware is different, but seeing the difference between bots does give you an idea of how far the development community has come over the last years!

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Tuks on Apr 28^th, 2011, 7:04am

or you could just play 4 at a time, using most of the time doing something else on the computer, thats what i did.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Belteshazzar on Apr 28^th, 2011, 7:35am

on 04/28/11 at 00:18:26, Fritzlein wrote:

Once you have beaten the standard bot ladder, you are obviously capable of beating the full ladder.

I have beaten the standard bot ladder, but I still feel like I'm a long way from the skill level needed to beat the full ladder. There are five CC bots which despite trying I still haven't managed to beat, not counting the 2011 ones. I think the standard bot ladder needs to be updated to be representative of the current field, and should include a few CC bots.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by mistre on Apr 28^th, 2011, 11:27am

The bigger question is.... what happens when new bots get added to the page? Does everyone that has beaten all bots lose their status again?

This might be a reason to have some sort of tiered system. Here is an idea - you can do it by year. If a player has beaten all bots created in that specific year, then they are recognized in a specific list for that year. That way, when the 2011 bots get added, it won't cause any confusion.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 28^th, 2011, 11:52am

on 04/28/11 at 00:37:53, 722caasi wrote:

Oh, I support improving the achievement ladder without lengthening it. I would like to see the main bot ladder updated, adding a few bots at the top while thinning out a few old bots. This would leave a ladder with no more rungs but slightly more spaced out due to moving the top rung higher. To make the top of the standard bot ladder the true top only requires adding one bot, but I guess I would add about six while removing an equal number.

on 04/28/11 at 11:27:01, mistre wrote:

The bigger question is.... what happens when new bots get added to the page? Does everyone that has beaten all bots lose their status again?

Sure, why not? Especially if we are updating the bot ladder to include the latest and strongest bots, you should have to re-earn your badge of honor.

As you might have inferred from my comment above, I think the "advanced" ladder is a fairly silly idea in the first place, because it is based on sheer quantity. I'd rather see Omar's time spent updating/improving the standard ladder as opposed to adding yearly recognition or semi-recognition or otherwise fiddling with the supernumerary ladder.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Eltripas on Apr 28^th, 2011, 12:45pm

on 04/28/11 at 00:18:26, Fritzlein wrote:

Once you have beaten the standard bot ladder, you are obviously capable of beating the full ladder.

That's not true, the strongest bot in the standard bot ladder is bomb, while the strongest bot in the full bot ladder is Marwin /or Sharp), there is at least a 200 rating points difference between the strongest bots of the ladders.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Tuks on Jun 24^th, 2011, 9:13am

hey omar, when are the new bots going to be up and running, i just finished exams and i need a goal :)

and lightvector i'de love it if you have your new sharp play people or at least a good bot just so i can speculate on its new strength ;)

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by omar on Jul 9^th, 2011, 5:18pm

on 06/24/11 at 09:13:17, Tuks wrote:

Pretty soon.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by omar on Jul 17^th, 2011, 12:23pm

I have setup the bots from the 2011 computer championship. All bots have P1, P2, CC, Fast and Blitz versions. You can access them from the Advanced Ladder:

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/botLadderAll.cgi

Note that even the CC bots won't actually be as strong as the version run during the computer championship because I have reduced the number of threads to 1 and lower memory usage for hash tables.

Also I am using the new timecontrols that will be used in future events:
2m/6m/100/0/8h/6m - for CC, P1, P2 bots
30s/3m/100/0/2h/3m - for Fast bots
15s/2m30s/100/0/1h/2m30s - for Blitz

I have not tested most of the bots, so if you notice any problems please let me know. Use the Contact page rather than the forum message system:

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/contact/

Have fun!!

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by mistre on Jul 17^th, 2011, 2:24pm

Thanks Omar!

I think those new P2 bots should have started out with a rating of 1800 at least though (if not 1900 on Marwin, Briareus, and Sharp).

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Belteshazzar on Jul 17^th, 2011, 4:16pm

Remember to reset the list of people who have beaten them all (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/botLadderAllComp.cgi).

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by mistre on Jul 18^th, 2011, 1:16pm

Also Clueless2011P1 and P2 are taking 2 mins per move - so acting more like CC.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Belteshazzar on Jul 19^th, 2011, 1:50am

on 07/18/11 at 13:16:46, mistre wrote:

Also Clueless2011P1 and P2 are taking 2 mins per move - so acting more like CC.

Is this perhaps because Clueless2011 is too weak at normal timing? I remember playing it when it was briefly available earlier this year, and its performance was surprisingly poor.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by rbarreira on Jul 19^th, 2011, 3:16am

As I may have mentioned before, Briareus's time management code is not designed for time controls without a maximum reserve limit, or with a maximum turn time. It seems the 2011 bots are set up with new time controls.

This means it uses a lot of time in its first move of the game, and I also wouldn't be surprised if it times out on some games.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Belteshazzar on Aug 17^th, 2011, 11:19pm

This page (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/botLadderAllComp.cgi) needs to be fixed.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by ocmiente on Oct 29^th, 2011, 12:14am

I finally completed the 'Advanced Ladder'.
Some things could be better, in my opinion:

The page listing who has completed the ladder (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/botLadderAllComp.cgi) has a list of bots on it, so I think there's something wrong there.
The number of bots on the list is very high - maybe too high. Especially the number of CC bots.
bot_Sharp2010P2 should be removed because it takes too long to decide on a move for a P2 bot.

I do think that beating all of the bots taught me at least a couple of things:

Just playing that number of games requires a lot of practice avoiding blundering pieces
The different bots have different playing styles. Learning the behaviors of clueless, bomb, sharp, marwin, etc. was very interesting. By the end, it seemed like playing sharp was very easy compared to the others. I suspect that a large part of that was that my tactics had gotten much stronger by the time I reached sharp. I did play the bots in order of strength, for the most part.

I tried my best to avoid beating a bot by a well known weakness - like bait and tackle against bomb. Having said that, there are some slightly more advanced techniques like swarming and burying bomb's elephant after an elephant/horse attack, or framing clueless' horse with an unbalanced setup. The difference between obviously exploiting a bot's weakness and a not so obvious one can get hazy.
What I found most interesting was when my plan fell apart due to some slight mistake, requiring me to play in unfamiliar territory.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 29^th, 2011, 10:15am

on 10/29/11 at 00:14:43, ocmiente wrote:

I finally completed the 'Advanced Ladder'.
Some things could be better, in my opinion:

The page listing who has completed the ladder (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/botLadderAllComp.cgi) has a list of bots on it, so I think there's something wrong there.
The number of bots on the list is very high - maybe too high. Especially the number of CC bots.
bot_Sharp2010P2 should be removed because it takes too long to decide on a move for a P2 bot.

I'll second the motion for fixing the page listing who has beaten every available bot. On the other two points, however, I would say that there is nothing wrong with the list, only something wrong with the title. This isn't an "advanced ladder". It isn't a contest except of patience and endurance. In truth it is simply a list of all bots that are available to play, which some people have chosen to take as a challenge.

If it really were designed as a challenge, then one of the most important things would be to take off most of the weak bots. What purpose do they serve? And yes, various other bots could be removed from the list for various other reason. But then, for completeness sake, Omar would create yet another page listing every bot that is available to play. And then some people who had completed the properly designed advanced ladder would take it as yet another challenge to beat every single available bot. And then someone would complain that beating every single available bot is a poorly designed challenge...

So the way to solve the "problem", IMHO, is not to call the list of all bots the "advanced ladder", and not to make it seem like a challenge by recognizing the "winners". :P It seems clear to me that anyone who has beaten, say, every bot rated over 2000, could beat every bot ever created if they were dedicated enough to attempt it.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by ocmiente on Oct 29^th, 2011, 11:02am

The meaningfulness of many competitions depends on your perspective at the time. For someone with a rating above 2200, completing the 'Advanced Ladder' would almost certainly be an exercise in patience and futility. For someone just starting out, it would be a much different experience. I'm somewhere in the middle and found the experience painful a few times, but I still need lots of practice avoiding blunders, developing strategies and executing tactics. It was useful to me.

The one thing that the ladder did not help me with much was noticing when an opponent blunders. That's something that bots don't seem to do as much as human opponents. Playing bots made me used to playing opponents that didn't blunder, so I didn't look for it as much as I should.

With respect to bullet 2 (the number of CC bots is high), I would prefer if only the top two finishers of the CC should be added each year.

With respect to bullet 3, bot_Sharp2010P2 moves more slowly than the 'fast' bots. When I sit down to play a P2 bot, I expect it to play more quickly than a 'fast' bot. I don't think any of the other P2 bots behave the way Sharp2010P2 does. Basically, for a P2 bot, I'm expecting something that give me 2 minutes to think about the move, and the bot will move in less than 30 seconds. If it doesn't do that, it shouldn't be on the list.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 29^th, 2011, 1:07pm

on 10/29/11 at 11:02:05, ocmiente wrote:

TWith respect to bullet 2 (the number of CC bots is high), I would prefer if only the top two finishers of the CC should be added each year.

I'm missing something in the logic. You think Omar shouldn't make all CC bots available to be played? Why not? It seems like a benefit to make them available to play, even if only a very few people want to play them.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by ocmiente on Oct 29^th, 2011, 9:18pm

Yeah, that's pretty much accurate. In my opinion, all of the CC bots should not be available to be played. The fact is, these aren't actually the CC bots anyway. They are limited to one thread and the memory for their hash tables is less than what they had when the computer championships were run. That is, they are not really the full blown CC version of the bot.

Having played all of the versions of all of the bots available, my sense was that the overall behavior of the bot didn't change enough between the fast versions and the CC versions to justify having the CC versions around.

CC bots take a long time to play. If they are going to be included in the list of available bots, there should be a compelling reason. The same could be said about lightning bots, which are painful to play for the opposite reason - and we have only one of those on the Advanced Ladder.

I might not be clear on one thing, so I want to make sure that it is clear that when I write 'CC bot' I mean the version on the ladder that plays at 2 minutes/move and has 'CC' in its name. The fast, blitz, P1 and P2 versions of the bots that competed in the computer championship are great to have around.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by mistre on Oct 29^th, 2011, 11:41pm

I agree with Ocmiente. I feel no compelling reason to beat all available bots because playing the CC's is such a drag. The only other bot I really dislike playing is Bomb_Lightning because I can't send the moves fast enough (there must be a keyboard trick people are using to beat it).

Knowing that the CC's are not really the same as the bots that competed in the challenge are all the more reason to not keep adding new versions to the bots available every year. Do they eat up server space?

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by lightvector on Oct 30^th, 2011, 1:13am

If beating every bot wasn't recognized with a special page and if the list of all the bots wasn't called the "advanced ladder", then would this discussion even exist? Without these things, having additional bots could only be good, benefiting the players who want to play them (even if only a few), and not hurting anyone who doesn't want to play them.

It seems like it's only the specific issue of getting one's name recognized for beating all the bots that's at stake here. I can't think of too much else that the presence of the CC bots harms. For example, if you think beating every bot except the too-slow CC bots is good practice, then it's just as good practice if you simply don't play the CC bots so long as you don't care about getting your name on the special page.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by rbarreira on Oct 30^th, 2011, 2:55am

I disagree with ocmiente and mistre, agree with lightvector and Fritzlein. The CC bots are important especially for bot developers who want to see how their bots play at the CC time control. This is not something one does often, but it is important to be able to do it. If the only available CC bots are the strongest ones, that doesn't help to test lower-rated bots.

In fact, the WCC rules state:

Quote:

Also 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.

The fact that (some) bots are weaker than the versions that played in the CC doesn't matter that much, as a bot author can always play with 1 thread if they want to equalize the hardware as much as possible.

Let's not take this ability away just because some people don't feel like playing against CC bots but still want to get a trophy which says they beat all the bots.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 30^th, 2011, 9:36am

on 10/29/11 at 23:41:08, mistre wrote:

I agree with Ocmiente. I feel no compelling reason to beat all available bots because playing the CC's is such a drag.

I agree with you on this point. There are 13 available CC bots that I have never played. I, too, feel no compelling reason to beat them all. The strongest incentive to do so is the thought that my name would be recognized on a special page if I did it; otherwise I don't think I would have even considered it.

Another person who agrees with you is Omar. That is why he took the CC bots off the main bot ladder, even though in ancient days the CC bots were "Level 6".

Quote:

Do they eat up server space?

No, the disk space consumed is negligible. The relevant resources they eat up are CPU and core memory, but only when they are being played. That is to say, if nobody ever plays against them, they aren't in the way, whereas if people do want to play against them, they use resources but presumably in a good cause.

The only time I can recall the CC bots causing a problem is when someone doesn't really want to play CC bots, because they are boring, but does want to complete the "advanced ladder", and therefore plays six CC bots at the same time, overloading the server. I guess that could be an argument for not having CC bots available, but to me it has a different interpretation:

Once upon a time there was a list of every bot available to play. This was a pure benefit to the Kingdom of Arimaa; a resource that harmed no one. Then one day that list was renamed "Advanced Bot Ladder", with a page created to honor brave knights who would slay every bot. This is when unhappiness and suffering crept into the Kingdom of Arimaa... ::)

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Tuks on Dec 31^st, 2011, 5:45am

i came on to say that there are a bunch of bots on the list of players who have beaten all bots but omni already stated that, is it going to be corrected? Doesn't seem like a very hard fix

and i agree that all the weaker bots need to be removed, maybe only bots over 1800 and only the top 4 CC bots, then it would remain an elite accomplishment, not a, "i managed to have the patience to get through every single bot even though there was no doubt i could beat some of them"

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Tuks on Dec 31^st, 2011, 5:47am

maybe add a column on the right saying that "this bot is needed to be on the " ------ " list then you don't have to have two pages, one where there are all the bots and one for this separate accomplishment ladder...then, those who want to show they are the best only have to go through the top 1800+ bots.

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by Tuks on Dec 31^st, 2011, 5:51am

that would take 83 bots out of the requirement!

Title: Re: Beating all bots availible
Post by novacat on Dec 31^st, 2011, 8:22am

I have no problem if people want an advanced challenge ladder with select bots (whether on a separate page or adding a column to the current page), but I do want to have a page with all the bots. I guess I am a glutton for punishment and would like to eventually beat every bot ever made (yes, I realize there are bots I can no longer play). Perhaps we can call it the "complete and unabridged, mind-numbingly tedious list of all playable bots." :P No recognition necessary upon completion.