Life In 19x19

I think Zen is nowhere near enough to beat pros even. I also suspect that Takemiya could give 5 stones or even more if he didn't care about pretty game records :p

Pippen wrote:Now, we got a problem chess has for some years now: players that cheat in running a programm besides their play on the internet. I don't see a effective solution other than blitz games.

Zen is using a lot of power to deliver these results, isn't it? The Monte Carlo bots have made huge strides (well, at least Zen has!). That has forced a lot of people to reconsider their guesstimates about how strong Zen is, how quickly it's improving, and things like that. But how strong would Zen be if it were running on my laptop?

I am pretty impressed, however I think people are expecting result too quickly. MCTS has a limit because of size of the Branching factor. Also I'd be interested to know what the time limits were like for these games.

jts wrote:

Pippen wrote:Now, we got a problem chess has for some years now: players that cheat in running a programm besides their play on the internet. I don't see a effective solution other than blitz games.

Zen is using a lot of power to deliver these results, isn't it? The Monte Carlo bots have made huge strides (well, at least Zen has!). That has forced a lot of people to reconsider their guesstimates about how strong Zen is, how quickly it's improving, and things like that. But how strong would Zen be if it were running on my laptop?

Some versions of Zen are running on standard hardware (though upper range, nonetheless) or small clusters (4-8 PCs).
Given the natural hardware evolution (hail Moore's law!), that's how powerful new laptops will be in two to four years.

I would really like to read Takemiya's comments on the game. Considering that both Takemiya and Zen are known for their use of influence, I wonder what he thinks of Zen's unorthodox style, and whether he plans on studying the strategy that the computer employs.

speedchase wrote:MCTS has a limit because of size of the Branching factor.

Hm? MCTS is a way of minimizing the effect of huge branching factors...

Who was making the moves on the board for Zen?

daniel_the_smith wrote: Hm? MCTS is a way of minimizing the effect of huge branching factors...

Sorry, what I was trying to say was that MCTS is only useful to an extent because the huge branching factor prevents MCTS from seeing all the moves. to play like a pro, I think an MCTS bot will have to run so many simulations that it seems all of the possible moves many moves deep, and then still run a considerable number of moves for each possible branch

mschribr wrote:Who was making the moves on the board for Zen?

I think Mr. Kato Hideki of team DeepZen.

EdLee wrote:I think Mr. Kato Hideki of team DeepZen.

Yup. He is often on KGS as gghideki when Zen plays tournament games (he speaks English well).

Pippen wrote:Now, we got a problem chess has for some years now: players that cheat in running a programm besides their play on the internet. I don't see a effective solution other than blitz games.

Not to derail the topic totally, but I thought some of you might find the following article iteresting. It's about combatting cheating in chess: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/scien ... chess.html

daal wrote:

Pippen wrote:Now, we got a problem chess has for some years now: players that cheat in running a programm besides their play on the internet. I don't see a effective solution other than blitz games.

Not to derail the topic totally, but I thought some of you might find the following article iteresting. It's about combatting cheating in chess: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/scien ... chess.html

Thanks for the link, that was very interesting!