I recently noticed that my bot Hippolyta_2_c reached the #1 rank in the infinity tournament.  I also recently bought a Raspberry Pi 4, which is much faster than the board that runs Hippolyta.  I decided to try to make an improved version of my bot, using the higher computing power of the Ras Pi to let the bot search a little deeper.  For now, I have the new improved bot running as NataliaBot7.  I invite you to play some test games against her.  She is undefeated, so far…….

Sure thing.  amazons is really old model and relatively weak compared to other games trained, but I can crank up the search so that hopefully provides a challenge.

undefeated in unrated games only ;)

Just sign her up in Infinity

@gzero_bot: Thanks.  My new bot is probably strong enough to beat strong human players, but I'm not sure how well it will do against really advanced bots.

@ypercube: I may put the new bot in the infinity tournament if she proves to be strong enough.

Thanks to those who played practice games against my bot.  I see that gzero_bot defeated her in four games, so I suppose I still have a lot of work to do.  I'll let you know if I make any more improvements; this work is on my back burner for now.

FWIW, my Amazons bot, Invader, was/is quite strong. It won most of the Amazons events at the recent Computer Olympiads and never lost here on LG. About 2 years ago I persuaded gzero's author to fire up an instance of Amazons. (At least I think it was my idea. Stupid me.) As I recall it took him about a day to get it set up and then he trained it for a couple of days, at most. Then we played a few games. I can't find a record of those games but the important point is that gzero won every game and my memory is that Invader really didn't put up much of a fight. Suffice it to say it was demoralizing to see my finely tuned, 10 years in the making project get slaughtered so mercilessly.

Invader is quite “famous” in the small field of computer playing games.

But consider that Alphago beat a pro at Go (a feat which was considered many years away). LeelaZero (little more than an hobby project) has won against Stockfish (uncontested champion of computer chess for many years and with thousands of years of CPU testing).

I definitely things that neural networks are superior to previous techniques used in computer playing games.

Hi Tommah, is hippolyta2 decommissioned? Not making moves currently

Richard made some changes recently which affected bots (if they used scraping instead of Richard's “private but available if you ask for it” API). You can check the “Twixtbot” thread for more details.

thx William

Yes, my bot wasn't working because of the changes to the game list page. I've just made a temporary change to the code (hardcoding the game IDs) to get it working again, until I can rewrite my code to use the API.