Computer Olympiad 2015

Hello,

the Computer Olympiad 2015 will take place in Leiden (NL),

starting on June 30.

Several games will be played, and some of the bots active here

on LittleGolem will play.

Richard Lorentz will be present in Amazons (where he is title defender)

and in Breakthrough and Havannah. Unfortunately so far there are no

other entry in Breakthrough and Havannah.

Hex will be played in two divisions: on 11x11 and 13x13.

Go will be played on 9x9, 13x13, 19x19 - and in some variants

with partial information.

A whole bunch of Shogi variants will be played.

EinStein wurfelt nicht has two participants so far: Andrew Lin from the

US and Yasumasa Tamura from Japan.

Alongside the competitions a conference "Advances in Computer Games"

will be held from July 01 to July 03.

Cheers, Ingo.

May the best calculator prevail !

Will mini shogi be played?

..or is it too easy to brute force?

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Thanks to Richard for repairing the bug

in this thread!

ingo.

Is it possible to participate in "Einstein würfelt nicht" without coming to Leiden personally?

I could sent in the programm or let my PC running all day and playing the game on little Golem( the program thniks around 5 seconds per move)

Chicagos

Quick look at rules, need programmer with understanding of unique code

Lending the code to another programmer would probably require a good month to understand their programming style and logic

ok it makes sense that you have to be there. On the other hand it would be possible to send in an .exe which reads in the current position und dice role, plays a good move and saves it into a text file. It would be also much faster than play all games manually.

Nevertheless I want to challange all bots on LG (especially if you are a participant of the Computer Olympiad).

If you are interessted please send to my bot Pikachu_c as many invitations for 3Point matches as you want.

If you are a human player you are of course welcome too :)

I don't see such restriction in the rules.

The part about the Chess Championship has:

> At least one of the program developers should attend the WCCC to operate the program, otherwise (i.e., for non program developers) the entry fee for the program is doubled.

It's not clear if the same applies for the Computer Olympiad.

There are very few formal rules at the Olympiad. In my opinion the emphasis there tends to me more on meeting with, chatting, and exchanging ideas with fellow programmers. Don't get me wrong, everybody still wants to win and there are plenty of sweaty palms, tense moments, and even exultant screams during the events. But for the most part everybody is reasonably cordial and accommodating to each other.

Getting back to Chicagos' question I think there is no problem participating even if you can't be there personally. I've certainly played against a number of programs in a number of different events where the operator knew little, if nothing about the program they were running. In fact, in a particularly touching moment, the winner of the first EWN event was by a program from Theo van der Storm who had passed away some years earlier.

Hello all, helo chicagos,

I want to add something to the wise word of wanderer_bot:

\* Being in place personally is the very best way to participate in a computer olympiad.

You will meet nice people and get lots of exchange and atmosphere.

\* Having an operator as a substitute is fine in most cases/games. Chess is a sort of

exception because of the cheating problem; see the infamous history of Rybka

for instance.

\* Finding a qualified operator is a nontrivial task. You can NOT delegate that task

to the organizers of the event.

\* on Chicagos in particular: currently you play anonymously here on LG.

You have to disclose your identity when a bot of yours participate in Leiden.

\* On Theo van der Storm: Ewn was first played in the 2011 Olympiad. At that time

Theo's bot had been in the Ewn scene for already six years; Theo had done a lot to

popularize the game; and there were two persons taking care for the operation

of it in Tilburg (where the Computer Olympiad 2011 took place). Letting Theo's

bot participate was a way to honour his contributions to the Ewn scene.

\*\*\********************

By the way; Leiden is not far from Germany and may be reached

quite easily by car or train.

For Chicagos: When you are willing to disclose your identity and have a proper

operator candidate for Leiden at hand you can contact me via my mail

address at  @uni-jena.de , and I will try to help you. (You find the mailing

address with Google search).

Cheers, Ingo.

Any news from those who are attending?

Of particular to me:  Is there going to be a Dots and Boxes tournament?  If so, any idea when?

Thanks,

William Fraser and The Shark

Hello William,

news from Leiden: this afternoon there was some dots-and-boxes game running.

But one of the bots hang up (not yours) and the "officials" did not know what to do.

The accident happened early in the game - and there was no clear rule about the

thinking times. So "we" were unsure what to do ....  I could not follow in detail

because I was involved in the "EinStein wurfelt nicht" tournament. Four participants:

from the US, China, Japan, Germany (Jena). Ten games in each pairing. We (Jena)

won all three matches. But some games are still missing to decide who gets silver

and bronze.

By the way: it seems that Richard Lorentz and his Wanderer achieved Gold in Amazons.

You can see a few photos in this thread in a German Go forum.

http://www.dgob.de/yabbse/index.php?topic=5714.0

Cheers, Ingo.

Ah.  I just got an email that my snipurl failed:

www.snipurl.com/TheShark

I'm not sure why as it was working a few weeks ago when I tested it.

In any case, at least there is time to make adjustments....

the TheShark.jar which i happened to find a while back is working well at the moment, you could just send them the jar by mail if all else fails.

sorry for doubleposting. I just noticed and want to report that following issue is now a problem again:

"When I first wrote the shark, it needed to play all four corners, so I required it to play a corner before the opponent could create a situation where it needed to sacrifice in order to get its move in (imagine, for example, that it played a different corner and you played h1 or g2. It would then need to sacrifice in order to play i2)."

Yes, I know.  Unfortunately, the reason is that The Shark is back at the state where it needs to play all 4 corners.....

Somehow, after my main copy went down, I managed to delete my backup in the process of trying to rebuild the bad RAID array so that I could make a copy of the backup.

Ugh.

Luckily, I had the necessary 35 days to rebuild the 4-corner position.

And I estimate that it will only take about 12 months to rebuild the 2-corner position.....

Oh, and you must have found the copy fairly recently, as I have switched servers since the last time I posted TheShark.jar.

Oh, and I was able to reach them and get the jar file to them....

Hello,

you can find a few photos (currently six) in the following thread

in Germany's Go-Forum:

http://www.dgob.de/yabbse/index.php?topic=5714.0

In Photo 1 war Gold- and Silver medalist for 9x9-Go (Hideki Kato with Zen;

Tobias Graf (Paderborn) with Abakus).

Photo 2 is from chess, with second person from the left Richard Pijl (he once

had a Havannah bot here on LG).

Photo 3 is with scene from 9x9-Go and Chinese Chess.

Photo 4 is from the "EinStein wurfelt nicht"-tournament. My Jena group (with "Hanfried")

achieved gold ahead of Andrew Lin (USA), and two team from Japan and China.

Photos 5 and 6 are from the end of the chess game between Jonny (by Dr. Johannes

Zwanzger) and Komodo (by Mark Lefler, Larry Kaufman, and Erdogan Guenes). Jonny

won after more than 150 move pairs - with white knight on a8 and white bishop on h8

short before the end.

Ingo.

Some more pictures from Computer Olympiad and Computer Chess World

Championships online under

http://www.dgob.de/yabbse/index.php?topic=5714.msg193240#msg193240

Ingo.