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Topic: 2008 Postal Tournament (Read 6297 times) |
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RonWeasley
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Harry's friend (Arimaa player #441)
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #60 on: Jun 16th, 2008, 3:24am » |
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Oh man! Now everybody's watching. And the Slytherins are singing that song again.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #61 on: Jun 19th, 2008, 8:11pm » |
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on Jun 8th, 2008, 5:22pm, mistre wrote:| What is interesting in both mine and Arimaa_Master's losses to OpFor is that we both had a horse framed. |
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Live by the frame, die by the frame. It looks like OpFor lost to sharp due to over-valuing the camel frame. It's weird how OpFor has done so well, yet lost to the lowest-seeded player in the tournament. Sharp appears poised to lose all games except against OpFor, and a gift (on time) from nbarriga.
OpFor can still win eight games of its seventeen by pulling out the victory in its final game against woh. So far it looks pretty even. Whatever the outcome is, I will declare it a fluke. 
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #62 on: Jun 19th, 2008, 8:12pm » |
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on Jun 16th, 2008, 3:24am, RonWeasley wrote:| Oh man! Now everybody's watching. And the Slytherins are singing that song again. |
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Everyone is watching you take sole possession of first place, with five wins and no losses. Well done!
I'm amazed that, at this late stage of the tournament, there are still six undefeated players.
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| « Last Edit: Jun 19th, 2008, 8:12pm by Fritzlein » |
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RonWeasley
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #63 on: Jun 20th, 2008, 4:16am » |
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on Jun 19th, 2008, 8:12pm, Fritzlein wrote:
Everyone is watching you take sole possession of first place, with five wins and no losses. Well done! |
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I'm winning! Well, let's not count acromantulas before they molt.
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Arimabuff
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #64 on: Jun 20th, 2008, 4:27am » |
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on Jun 20th, 2008, 4:16am, RonWeasley wrote:
I'm winning! Well, let's not count acromantulas before they molt.
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Let's not chicken before the count's hatchet. 
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #65 on: Jul 13th, 2008, 4:46pm » |
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Still none of the players have completed all of their games. I feel sorry for woh. Four players (OpFor, TheJeh, ArifSyed, and ChrisB) have completed all of their games except against woh, so whenever the poor guy moves in any of those games he can expect a quick response.
Mistre, I don't know how you have such a knack for getting in unclear positions, but I noticed your endgame against Adanac is another exciting one. This tournament has produced some great fighting Arimaa!
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| « Last Edit: Jul 14th, 2008, 6:46pm by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #66 on: Jul 14th, 2008, 6:46pm » |
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61 of the 84 games in the tournament have finished. The_Jeh is the first participant to finish all of his games over the board. Against an average opponent rating of 1956, he scored four wins in five games, for a performance rating of 2197. Well done, John!
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The_Jeh
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #67 on: Jul 14th, 2008, 8:37pm » |
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Thanks, Fritz. You were right, though - I should have taken a few more games. I'll be sure to take at least eight next year.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #68 on: Jul 19th, 2008, 7:15am » |
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I thought my load of eight games was too few last year (except in a few moments of frazzledness), but this year I thought thirteen was too many. Maybe I'll get wise and take ten a year from now on; ten used to be the mandatory standard.
We have just passed the 100-day mark, and only three undefeated players remain: chessandgo, RonWeasley, and myself. Given that the first three postal tournaments each had an undefeated player, it's natural to ask who will go undefeated this year, but I wouldn't be surprised if nobody runs the table, because we are each in trouble in at least two games.
Sharp has also finished all of its games, with a record of 1-8, not counting a time win from an equal position. Against sharp's particular opponents, that's a performance rating of 1568, more in line with what I would expect from a bot playing at postal speeds, although a bit on the low side.
Lightvector, thank you very much for entering sharp in the Postal Mixer this year. I hope the games are useful to you in your quest to make the evaluation more sophisticated. Certainly it was a treat for me (and I hope others) to get a serious game against the new bot on the block.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 19th, 2008, 8:26am by Fritzlein » |
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mistre
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #69 on: Jul 19th, 2008, 10:53am » |
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The biggest surprise of the tournament for me is how poorly Blue22 is faring especially since he beat me pretty easily. His 4 wins came from Sharp, myself, ChrisB, and a timeout.
In one of his remaining games, it looks like he is trying to swarm Woh the same way he swarmed me, but Woh's E is mobile and centered, so I don't know how that is going to work. Should make for an exciting finish.
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aaaa
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #70 on: Jul 19th, 2008, 11:11am » |
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I understand blue22 has a bit of a reputation of seemingly cavalierly advancing rabbits for its own sake. He's like the opposite of me in that respect.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #71 on: Jul 19th, 2008, 1:24pm » |
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It seems that postal play tips the advantage towards defensive play. For example, robinson's slash and burn tactics that won him the 2006 World Championship were only good enough for four wins and six losses in the 2006 postal tournament.
In that light, it is too bad that blue22 doesn't play in the World Championship. His reckless attacks would be very difficult to refute in live games; I would have bet on him to at least make the final eight this year.
What (still) surprises me most this tournament is OpFor's excellent handling of wide-open games. Blue22 has shredded Bomb many times after losing his camel for inadequate compensation such as a pair of dogs, so it's no wonder he keeps attacking all out. For some reason, though, it didn't work out so well against OpFor.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 19th, 2008, 1:31pm by Fritzlein » |
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aaaa
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #72 on: Jul 19th, 2008, 2:51pm » |
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on Jul 19th, 2008, 1:24pm, Fritzlein wrote:| What (still) surprises me most this tournament is OpFor's excellent handling of wide-open games. Blue22 has shredded Bomb many times after losing his camel for inadequate compensation such as a pair of dogs, so it's no wonder he keeps attacking all out. For some reason, though, it didn't work out so well against OpFor. |
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Fritzlein, I think that, ironically due to your overwhelming dominance of the game of Arimaa (with my rating system currently considering you over 140 Elo points stronger than chessandgo alone), it could be that you're not in the position to fully appreciate that, despite its selling point, the view of the fabled computer ineptitude at this game is currently in need of a bit of a nuance.
I believe that there are only a handful of people out there that can beat the strongest few bots while truly being oblivious about the nature of his or her opponent. The rest of us lot will struggle mightily in open, tactical games against the top bots, while having much better luck when resorting to well-known (outworn?) anti-computer strategies.
Perhaps a combination of subconscious human overconfidence in his natural advantage against bots in postal games, leading to open games, and OpFor's relatively newness on the scene, too short to expose its weaknesses, might be enough to explain its excellent results in the tournament.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #73 on: Jul 19th, 2008, 4:24pm » |
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That could all be true (except for the overwhelming dominance bit ).
As long as I am significantly better than OpFor, it will be difficult for me to tell how wide the gap is by playing OpFor. Kasparov was overconfident going into his match with Deep Blue too; he didn't clue in based on the successes of computers against increasingly strong humans.
I have been thinking that we had better not ascribe too much significance to OpFor's results across a mere 17 games, and that we won't know how good OpFor really is until Janzert puts it on line for open play after the Postal Mixer is over. However, it may be that we won't know how good OpFor is even then, because then we will learn new formulas to beat this new bot, which will lead to a new round of overconfidence on humanity's part.
If you think computer ineptitude at Arimaa is over-hyped at the moment, imagine how I felt when I joined in the summer of 2004 and saw only three players rated higher than the top bot. And it was even worse in the summer of 2003. At that time it wasn't clear whether there was even one human better than Bomb! It seemed to me that Omar had put out a lot of confident assertions about his game that reality wasn't backing up.
Interestingly, however, Omar's hype has become slightly more true every year since the first. We humans are still rapidly getting better, and not just by memorizing anti-bot strategies. I don't know when I last learned something by playing a bot, but I'm confident I'm 100 Elo points stronger than I was last year.
Leading up to the 2005 challenge match, there was much more debate about the strength of computer players than there is now. Fotland was still improving Bomb, and it wasn't obvious that new human strategic insights would translate into a lasting human advantage. Perhaps, we thought, every time a human learns something new, bot developers will just feed that insight back into the evaluation function. That's what happened with frames, elephant blockades, and camel hostages, so why not with everything else?
After a much-improved Bomb was crushed for a second time, Fotland worked on it a bit more, but basically threw in the towel on trying to win the Arimaa Challenge. I have taken this as evidence that whatever humans learn about Arimaa really does tip the scale against machines. It helps us more than them.
From that experience, I extrapolate that as long as we are learning more and more about Arimaa strategy, the gap between humans and machines will continue to expand. Meaning no disrespect to possible software improvements, I don't think they will come mostly from me sitting down with a developer and telling him how I think about the game. To a certain extent knowledge of the game is useful and necessary to the programmer, but at some point our fuzzy way of thinking doesn't fit into code.
So, although it is hard for me to get a good read on how much better than OpFor I am, I remain confident that the trend is still in our favor. Even if OpFor has taken a quantum leap and lopped 200 Elo points off of our lead, I think we will build it back up faster than Janzert can keep improving OpFor.
At some point, human learning about Arimaa has got to plateau. The game can only have a limited amount of depth that is within our comprehension. If I ever start to feel that I play just the same this year as I did last year, then I will spend more time looking in the rear-view mirror, and start to calculate the number of years before faster hardware alone overwhelms us.
The wild-card in my mind is improved/different programming techniques. Developers are a long way from having tried everything yet, and some new approaches could turn out to be stronger than anyone expects. Without some software breakthrough, we're set to defend the Challenge until 2020 even if our strategic advances start to plateau tomorrow.
So yes, the fabled computer ineptitude needs a bit (a lot!) of nuance. We're not fantastically far ahead today, and nobody knows what is going to happen next. For the present, however, it looks rather like Arimaa has some genuine intrinsic computer resistance, and the more players and programmers have a go at the game, the more solidly the fact is established.
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aaaa
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #74 on: Jul 19th, 2008, 5:07pm » |
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Excuse me, but I don't want to be misunderstood, so I would like to point out an important distinction that tends to be blurred:
I personally agree fully with the notion that the odds are considerable that, at least till there is a truly major breakthrough in AI, no engine will ever be better than all humans in the game of Arimaa; make no mistake about that. So when it comes to Omar Syed's money, don't expect it to depart from him in the foreseeable future.
However, this given, and this needs to be stressed, tends to be warped into the different notion that every bot is actually bad at the game and this is what I disagree with.
It's well possible that one can improve a bot till it reaches a plateau of, let's say, the fifth percentile of all Arimaa players, making it not that great a threat to the defense of the challenge, but certainly not something I would label as inept.
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