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        Arimaa >> Bot Development >> Couple of AEI questions
        
(Message started by: leon_messerschmidt on Jun 22^nd, 2014, 2:30am)

Title: Couple of AEI questions
Post by leon_messerschmidt on Jun 22^nd, 2014, 2:30am

I have a couple (no doubt rather obvious) AEI questions but I can't seem to find the answers on the forum :-/ Please point me in the right direction.

1. Where are bots hosted from? Do you simply run it from a home PC, Amazon EC2, or what?

2. How do you run a bot with the older 'getMove' style interface with AEI?

Title: Re: Couple of AEI questions
Post by rbarreira on Jun 22^nd, 2014, 5:16am

1- Do you mean for the official Arimaa events like the computer championship and challenge? If yes, Omar takes care of that. He usually rents some dedicated servers to run bots on.

If you mean for the bot ladder, they run on the same server that hosts arimaa.com.

2- I believe rabbits made an adapter for that purpose, but I forget if it's included with the AEI package or not.

Title: Re: Couple of AEI questions
Post by leon_messerschmidt on Jun 22^nd, 2014, 6:55am

1. At the moment my bot only plays against me, a mediocre player at best. I'd like to see how it does against some other human players. How do I get on the bot ladder? And is this an appropriate spot for a bot that might change every other week?

2. If someone could point out the adapter I'd be happy to figure out how it works and add some examples/docs as a pull request on github.

Title: Re: Couple of AEI questions
Post by JimmSlimm on Jun 22^nd, 2014, 8:18am

on 06/22/14 at 06:55:46, leon_messerschmidt wrote:

I think only bots that joined the championship is put on the bot-ladder at the server.
I think you need to create open games with your bot on your PC, and just hope that players will join.

And just in case you didn't know, you can start games with the bots already on the ladder and join with your bot.

Title: Re: Couple of AEI questions
Post by lightvector on Jun 22^nd, 2014, 8:23am

The bot ladder only hosts bots that have played in the CC, which is why each bot on the ladder has a year in its name. The year indicates that it's the version that played in that year's CC.

Echoing JimmSlimm, an easy way to test things is to start bots from the bot ladder (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/botLadderAll.cgi) and then use gameroom.py to have your own bot join and play against it.

If you want your bot to play other human players, just leave it connected to the game room from your own computer continuously for several days. People will play it every so often. A simple script that randomly calls 'gameroom.py g' or 'gameroom.py s' every time in a loop works well enough. (unless gameroom.py can do this itself?). If you have more than 1 core on your computer and you don't want to run other compute-intensive stuff during that time, having it running for a few days sometimes consuming a core in the background hopefully shouldn't be a big deal, although sometimes this can be tricky for other reasons (ex: if you only have a laptop and need to move around frequently).

Here's a thread with rabbits's stuff, which includes the getmove -> AEI adapter:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=devTalk;action=display;num=1266712867

Title: Re: Couple of AEI questions
Post by leon_messerschmidt on Jun 22^nd, 2014, 4:05pm

Thank you for the information!

If all goes according to plan I might have an initial version of my bot playing in the gameroom in the next couple of weeks. I suspect it is going to get slaughtered though :o

Title: Re: Couple of AEI questions
Post by leon_messerschmidt on Jun 28^th, 2014, 2:11am

I figured out how to use the adapt.py script. In the last few weeks it took me a little bit of time to figure out the AEI scripts and I thought I'd expand the readme a little bit. I did a pull request to janzert on github but in the mean time you can see my fork here https://github.com/leonm/AEI

The gameroom bits are still a bit sparse because I'm only figuring it out this weekend ;-) Will make some more updates when I know more.

I'll do some pull requests for code improvements as well over the next few weeks if anyone's interested.