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Topic: 2008 Postal Tournament (Read 6294 times) |
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aaaa
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #75 on: Jul 22nd, 2008, 5:03am » |
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When bot_OpFor is done playing its last game of the tournament against woh, I would, if possible, love also to play a postal against it. I think I can safely make the claim that there are not that many other people out there (perhaps maybe Arimabuff) whose knack for playing against bots compares so favorably to their general skill (i.e. that against normal-playing humans); so how bot_OpFor performs against an otherwise only moderately strong player like myself could help establish a more clear "floor" of its performance, i.e. against more "optimized" opposition.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #76 on: Jul 22nd, 2008, 6:36am » |
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Perhaps Janzert could arrange immediately for you to play OpFor postally, especially if you intend to move several times a day to get the game over quickly. Whatever machine OpFor is running on is surely idling most of the time, since it is woh's move most of the time. If I understand how the bot script works, OpFor could join a second postal game without changing anything.
Of course it is up to Janzert whether to have OpFor play postal games rather than live ones, if it plays at all. I guess I could see the draw of playing live games only, so as to get a bigger body of games. Also, I'm still curious about one of my games against OpFor as to whether there was only one non-losing move at one point, and how long it will take OpFor to decide that is the case. That position could also be a test position for static goal extensions: how much faster will OpFor understand the situation with that performance tweak? I don't think I have seen the "stop thinking and play the only hope" behavior from a bot, nor am I sure how often the situation would even arise, so I'm curious what happens in one position where it actually did (apparently) arise.
Janzert, one drawback of having created (potentially) the best bot ever is that you are going to be in high demand. 
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Janzert
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #77 on: Jul 23rd, 2008, 1:01am » |
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I'm fairly reluctant to start any more postal games with OpFor right now. Games at live time controls and BvB games are actually what I'm more interested in at the moment.
I am currently building a file backup server for the house network. Thanks to moore's law even though I went for fairly low cost it will actually be slightly more powerful than my current desktop. Once I have it completely set up and operational I'm planning to set OpFor up to play live games on the server. If I get really ambitious I might try and set up something so people can start games at different time controls.
Unfortunately probably the best user interface to do that would be to allow OpFor to accept game invitations, but it appears that bots can't currently receive invites. There is a comment in the current bot interface that looks like omar started to implement it at one point but decided not to add the extra complexity.
Janzert
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #78 on: Aug 6th, 2008, 2:55pm » |
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Now that Adanac has survived a thrilling endgame against mistre, a quick check reveals that he could still run his remaining games. Yes, many of the positions are unclear and unstable, so he could lose four more as easily as lose no more, but nowhere is Adanac clearly losing already. That would raise an interesting possibility of Adanac and The Jeh being the only one-loss players this year. What a change that would be from having an undefeated player every year so far, and two last year!
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #79 on: Sep 16th, 2008, 7:45pm » |
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I have noticed that I am getting an automatic e-mail every five days to remind me that it is my move in the games where I am not moving. How long has that feature been around? I love it! Thanks, Omar, for the reminders.
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mistre
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #80 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 5:47am » |
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I also like how the games are now sorted on the postal games page by number of moves from largest to smallest. It makes it easy to find certain postal games.
I also noticed that there are a lot of postal matches that are still on move 1 (I am guessing that these were set up with the automatic pairing and then the player playing gold hasn't logged back in for a while).
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #81 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 6:18am » |
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on Sep 17th, 2008, 5:47am, mistre wrote:| I also noticed that there are a lot of postal matches that are still on move 1 (I am guessing that these were set up with the automatic pairing and then the player playing gold hasn't logged back in for a while). |
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Yeah, automatic registration for postal games is great for increasing participation, but the non-started games are lame. It harkens back to the first World Championship where registration was free, but there were a ton of no-shows. How do we balance encouraging registration with encouraging commitment? I like that the Postal Mixer and the World Championship now have registration fees that are not refunded in case of forfeits. It doesn't make sense for the auto-postal pairing to have a registration fee, but it's starting to look like it should be opt-in, not opt-out. Having all these non-started games is only going to teach newcomers that the feature is lame and turn them off from using it later on.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #82 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 12:46pm » |
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OpFor has just finished off its last game, against woh, with another victory. That leave OpFor with an 8-9 record for the tournament, and a performance rating of 2060.
This tremendous result must be regarded as some kind of fluke, because OpFor has attained a lower rating than that from live play in the game room over the last few weeks. However, the fluke can hardly be explained by our collective overconfidence, because woh, arimaa_master, and mistre all had fair warning that OpFor was lighting up the scoreboard while their own games were still unclear. I assume they all tried extra hard to win, but lost anyway. Perhaps we didn't know at first how to cope with OpFor's style, and we are learning better since. Alternatively OpFor's huge result is just one of those statistical outliers that will happen from time to time by chance.
Even if OpFor isn't really a 2060-strength postal player, it is obviously very strong, and in my mind the favorite to be the 2009 Challenger.
Janzert, now that OpFor's Postal Mixer is over, are you still willing to test OpFor on this game to see whether there was only one non-losing move, and if so, how long it takes OpFor to play that one move?
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mistre
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #83 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 1:01pm » |
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Is it possible that OpFor is stronger postally than live? I just defeated it live with 1 min time control, and while it is the toughest live version of OpFor that I have faced, I thought it played better in the postal game. Having said that, it has been performing very well the last two weeks in the live format, beating some higher ranked players. It has lost to a few bots which has lowered its ranking, but it is still a very respectable 1947. I would imagine the difference live vs. postal is smaller than 100 pts and probably no more than 30 pts - so a performance rating of 2060 postally sounds high, but I wouldn't call it a fluke.
I would like another shot against OpFor postally for sure (especially because I consider myself a stronger player in that format than live.)
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| « Last Edit: Sep 17th, 2008, 1:06pm by mistre » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #84 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 1:08pm » |
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on Sep 17th, 2008, 1:01pm, mistre wrote:| Is it possible that OpFor is stronger postally than live? |
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Hmmm... Postally OpFor has a time advantage that it doesn't have in live games. Most humans won't (can't) invest the two hours per move necessary to be on an even footing time-wise. But that same time advantage didn't help Bomb or Zombie. In fact both Bomb and Zombie had a worse performance rating postally than live. The conventional wisdom is that giving humans enough time avoid short-sighted blunders helps them more than giving computers a whole bunch of extra time to search deeper, because computers already are tactically excellent, and their weak strategy is barely helped by an extra ply or two.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #85 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 1:14pm » |
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I count only eight remaining games:
Adanac vs chessandgo
chessandgo vs Adanac
Fritzlein vs chessandgo
RonWeasley vs Fritzlein
chessandgo vs RonWeasley
Adanac vs RonWeasley
omar vs arimaa_master
woh vs ChrisB
Astonishingly, depending on how these games turn out, RonWeasley, chessandgo, and I could each still end with the best record outright, while Adanac could still end tied for the best record. Also omar vs. arimaa_master could reach 150 moves. It looks like the movie people planned it this way for greater drama.
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mistre
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #86 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 2:59pm » |
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In case you missed it, In my postal match vs Chessandgo, I played him virtually equal in material almost all the way up to the end (C vs RR). Eventually his attack was too much for my defense even though I was up a piece. I thought that with 8 rabbits still alive that I would get some kind of shot to break one through, but Chessandgo effectively blocked any potential breakaway attempts. I didn't see where I could have played this one any differently.
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=82970&s=b
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #87 on: Sep 17th, 2008, 7:50pm » |
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Yes, I noticed the game before. I discussed the material imbalance with aaaa in the chat room. After move 40 when you have RR for C, I thought you must be ahead materially, although chessandgo's attack is well underway. I was surprised chessandgo gave up the framed rabbit so easily, and not sure the attack fully compensated.
I went so far as to say that RR should always be worth more than C materially, to which aaaa proposed the possible counter-example of elephant, cat, and six rabbits versus elephant and eight rabbits. This inspired an experimental game on our part, which instead of proving which side was stronger, proved to me that I don't know how to play the endgame.
After move 40, I'm not sure how you should have played exactly, but I think going after his invading horse with your elephant should have been a lower priority relative to getting your own rabbits rolling. So on 41s, why not use the last two steps of your move to advance your g7-rabbit to g5 rather than relocating your elephant from f5 to e6? Actually your elephant might have landed on a weaker square in addition to using up the two steps. From then on you were in such a defensive bind I'm not sure what moves would have been better.
To play the reigning postal champ so tough is indeed an accomplishment to be proud of.
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mistre
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #88 on: Sep 18th, 2008, 10:49am » |
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on Sep 17th, 2008, 7:50pm, Fritzlein wrote:So on 41s, why not use the last two steps of your move to advance your g7-rabbit to g5 rather than relocating your elephant from f5 to e6? Actually your elephant might have landed on a weaker square in addition to using up the two steps. From then on you were in such a defensive bind I'm not sure what moves would have been better.
To play the reigning postal champ so tough is indeed an accomplishment to be proud of. |
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This seems to be a recurring theme among my postal losses. Omar and Adanac both made comments to the effect that they were worried about potential rabbit advances that never came. Personally, I did not see the opportunities, but I think it warrants being a little more aggressive in my postal play even when I don't see the immediate benefit.
I was very proud of my play vs Chessandgo in our postal game, in fact I think I caught him a little off guard which was satisfying. While I held out hope for a win, I certainly wasn't expecting it and was pretty sure he would put the hammer lock on me at some point.
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chessandgo
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Re: 2008 Postal Tournament
« Reply #89 on: Sep 18th, 2008, 11:19pm » |
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Good game, mistre ! It certainly was a tough one all along. I fear many people found it easier than usual to play the current postal champ this year
I'm not sure what to say about the sequence from 7 to 19. The following moves remind me that don't understand the start of endgames, and especially whether advanced (or even pinned) rabbits are an asset or a liability ... I guess I have to adjust my views toward liability ... i any case I messed up with the sequence from 21 to 27, and by letting you play 39b. After 39b I'm starting to feel behind, but I'm not sure what I would do with silver. In any case, that was a fun an atypical endgame ...
Thanks for the game, and looking forward to a rematch
Jean
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