Life In 19x19

The Deep Zen team said in KGS kibitz that Zen19K now had a Value Net -- AlphaGo's breakthrough innovation where a neural net evaluates the board position. Zen19K was already 8d on KGS back in July, presumably running with a Policy Net and Monte Carlo playouts. But now version 12.1 with the addition of a Value Net has become even stronger.

I'm really happy to see they are on track to reproduce AlphaGo's success. Back in March the Zen team announced they were teaming up with Dwango, a Japanese company, to get the hardware needed to train neural networks. (see http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=12750 ). I'm hopeful they will be able to improve their neural nets quickly and we'll see the first KGS 9d bot soon!

Zen19K's info shows the hardware they're running on:

Computer program Zen running on KURISU server provided by DWANGO.

CPU: Xeon E5-2623 v3 x2
GPU: GeForce GTX TITAN X x4

Honestly, I feel like I need a bot just to be able to get a game with one of these bots. There ought to be a queue system in place.

Where can we buy this 12.1 version?

zen19k is very popular, a lot of people competing in clicking fastest to play with it.
Imagine the popularity when AlphaGoBot play, you already won something if you click fast enough to get to play it

Krama wrote:Where can we buy this 12.1 version?

No idea, I don't think it’s possible to purchase it … but meanwhile it’s version 12.2, allegedly a bugfix

Zen19k is dominating at 8d, but 2 games against Ilya Shikshin 1p EGF caught my eye. First of all Zen won with a pretty convincing powerful attacking style on Ilya's weak groups which it almost teasingly allowed to live because it still won:


But then Ilya had his revenge with a magical win: he died in an approach ko early on and Zen looked good, but it then seemed to get confused when Ilya activated the ko and proceeded to waste a load of threats and fall behind and go bonkers. Is this weakness with approach ko something humans will be able to exploit?

Sinan Djepov aka YoungPro 6d on KGS posted some impressions of the program on his blog:

https://explorebaduk.wordpress.com/2016 ... en-zen19k/
https://explorebaduk.wordpress.com/2016 ... 9k-part-2/
https://explorebaduk.wordpress.com/2016 ... 9k-part-3/

Is this really going to work on an average laptop, with just one average GPU? When they they sell commercial version in the future, maybe it is going to be sold separately - CPU only vs CPU&GPU version?

Zen made a new account -- Zen19K2 -- and it is now 9d on KGS! Congratulations to the DeepZen team, well done.

It's the exact same software and hardware as Zen19K, but it limits handicap to 3 or less (Zen19K limits to 4 or less).

ETA: Zen is now #4 on the Top 100 list. Rating graph shows it's over 10d.

Zen19K2 is dominating! Beat cheater (Pavol Lisy 1p EGF) a few times, HitGirl7 (Mark Lee super strong korean insei who won US open beating quite a few low dan Chinese pros there), breakfast (Alex Dinerstein 3p)..., Tungpo (a strong player who plays Zen a lot).







Not quite invincible though: it did lose against a mystery guest, probably a Chinese 1p? Interesting that it lost when the human made a huge moyo.

I wonder why this page sometimes shows the games and sometimes doesn’t: http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=Zen19K2

(link edited, thanks to ez4u!)

It has to do with the extra characters at the end of the link:"%EF%BB%BF". It should only have "user=Zen19K2".

I'm more interest in Zen19L (long time setting), there's also Zen19M registered but I'm not sure if M is for medium time setting.

For the curious, the %EF%BB%BF on the end of Bonobo's link was the URI encoding of the UTF-8 encoding of the unicode character U+FEFF, a non-printable character used as a byte order mark or as a marker in text streams. It probably got there from some weird copy-paste.

Thanks to ez4u for the correction,

and thanks, Uberdude, for the explanation:

Uberdude wrote:For the curious, the %EF%BB%BF on the end of Bonobo's link was the URI encoding of the UTF-8 encoding of the unicode character U+FEFF, a non-printable character used as a byte order mark or as a marker in text streams. It probably got there from some weird copy-paste.

Yes, I’m curious indeed, and yes, I copied this and pasted (of course I didn’t type it), and I either didn't see or didn’t notice those characters, sorry for the confusion