Somehow, while trying to make a backup of my beloved Shark, I reformatted the wrong drive.

I've started rebuilding.

It will be a close thing as to whether I can get a reasonable level of play by the time of the World Computer Olympiad.

And it will be a year or so before I expect to be able to guarantee a win as player one.

Hm, I think the 2 months should suffice to build up enough strength for the Computer Olympiad, unless there's someone else with a gigantic database. I doubt there's any “smart” AI though. How long does it take to solve the position with four corner moves played?

Also, now that The_Shark isn't brokenly overpowered anymore: Is it going to re-enter tournaments?

Right now, it needs to play randomly for the first 12 moves or so.  No point entering it in tournaments.

I'm estimating about 2 weeks of full time running (which is not possible, unfortunately) to get it back to the position with 4 corner moves played.  That's my goal for the Olympiad.

No backups?

Well, my raid array failed a while back and I was using the backup.  I finally got a spare weekend to try to reformat the broken array so I could copy the original and have a backup again.  And all buffalo raid arrays look the same…. and….

It's not like I can keep a bunch of backups – it's a 10TB dataset….

shit. sorry to hear it.