Vargo wrote:
W wanted to continue, I stopped the game, to avoid 50+ useless moves.
akigo wrote:
I configured KataGo to use Tromp-Taylor rules (for the sake of consistency within the app since LeelaZero always uses Tromp-Taylor rules, it doesn't know any other ruleset). With these rules your final score is "stones on the board" + "territory". They have the advantage that they can be formulated very concisely (ideal for AI). But a "disadvantage" is that you can continue playing until the board is full without hurting your score: Playing inside your safe territory doesn't cost (the stone will live, so +1 for the additional stone and -1 for the lost territory) and playing inside your opponent's safe territory doesn't cost either (the stone will die, so no plus here, but also no minus for lost territory). So when there is nothing productive left to do, all moves and the pass are of equal value. I assume that in this case KataGo just plays one of these candidates randomly which is mostly an additional move.
@Vargo @akigo - Just so you know, it should be fairly rare that KataGo prolongs the game by a lot. Usually play some solid connecting moves to make some of its groups absolutely connected, and then proceed to focusedly capture all the dead groups. After that, it will pass, and will usually *not* attempt to play any further moves that would waste time. For example, you can take a look at games like this for typical behavior:
https://online-go.com/game/27067104Or this one, which has more dead stones:
https://online-go.com/game/27066163 - after the last dame is finished, kata spends almost all moves to cleanly capture the dead stones (required by tromp-taylor) and interposes one or two solid connection moves besides that, but no more, and then readily passes.
The reason KataGo behaves like this is because I added a *very* slight bias to prefer "orderly cleanup and then pass without wasting time" moves as a way to discriminate between moves at the end of the game that otherwise have no intrinsic preference or difference. It's only a very slight bias, but enough to produce this kind of behavior when all the moves still lead to the same outcome, rather than cleanup and passing being at the whim of the neural net's random noise preferences among all the possible moves. Unless you've disabled or changed it, the default config also has KataGo play faster if the opponent is passing a lot, so this cleanup also often doesn't take long.
50+ moves would be very atypical, although maybe it could happen in some case. But very, very atypical.