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Topic: Beating all bots availible (Read 4212 times) |
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mistre
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #16 on: Jul 18th, 2011, 1:16pm » |
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Also Clueless2011P1 and P2 are taking 2 mins per move - so acting more like CC.
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Belteshazzar
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #17 on: Jul 19th, 2011, 1:50am » |
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on Jul 18th, 2011, 1:16pm, mistre wrote:| Also Clueless2011P1 and P2 are taking 2 mins per move - so acting more like CC. |
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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.
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rbarreira
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #18 on: Jul 19th, 2011, 3:16am » |
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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.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 19th, 2011, 3:16am by rbarreira » |
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Belteshazzar
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #19 on: Aug 17th, 2011, 11:19pm » |
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This page needs to be fixed.
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ocmiente
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #20 on: Oct 29th, 2011, 12:14am » |
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I finally completed the 'Advanced Ladder'.
Some things could be better, in my opinion:
- The page listing who has completed the ladder 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.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 29th, 2011, 12:21am by ocmiente » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #21 on: Oct 29th, 2011, 10:15am » |
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on Oct 29th, 2011, 12:14am, ocmiente wrote:I finally completed the 'Advanced Ladder'.
Some things could be better, in my opinion:
- The page listing who has completed the ladder 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.
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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".  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.
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ocmiente
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #22 on: Oct 29th, 2011, 11:02am » |
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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.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #23 on: Oct 29th, 2011, 1:07pm » |
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on Oct 29th, 2011, 11:02am, 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. |
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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.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 29th, 2011, 1:08pm by Fritzlein » |
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ocmiente
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #24 on: Oct 29th, 2011, 9:18pm » |
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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.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 29th, 2011, 9:49pm by ocmiente » |
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mistre
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #25 on: Oct 29th, 2011, 11:41pm » |
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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?
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| « Last Edit: Oct 29th, 2011, 11:41pm by mistre » |
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lightvector
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #26 on: Oct 30th, 2011, 1:13am » |
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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.
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rbarreira
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #27 on: Oct 30th, 2011, 2:55am » |
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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. |
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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.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 30th, 2011, 3:01am by rbarreira » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #28 on: Oct 30th, 2011, 9:36am » |
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on Oct 29th, 2011, 11:41pm, 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. |
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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? |
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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... 
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Tuks
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Re: Beating all bots availible
« Reply #29 on: Dec 31st, 2011, 5:45am » |
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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"
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