[Computer-go] Beta-testing: feedback to bot owners

[Nick Wedd]

This is boring - most of you will want to skip it.

While beta-testing the improved tournament system on KGS, my task was to 
report on the behaviour of the tournament-scheduler.  But I happened to 
notice several things the bots did.  I report on these here.

In the biggest tournament I ran, the komi was set to 7, allowing jigo. 
It seemed that gnugo3pt7 (a pre-MC build of GNU Go, which I ran) 
understood this, but StoneGrid and Orego12 did not.  As a result, 
gnugo3pt7 got several undeserved wins against these stronger programs.
     I now think that using integer komi is a mistake.  I do not plan to 
use it in future events.  And it will not be used in the computer events 
in the European Go Congress this summer.

The final test I did used 11x11 boards.  When StoneGrid joined its game, 
it immediately and repeatedly disconnected and reconnected.  Indeed, it 
did this so rapidly that I could deduce that Professor Drake lives 
rather close to Portland, Oregon.  StoneGrid had played normally in the 
previous tests, so I guess it dislikes non-standard board sizes.

The clean-up phase was mishandled in at least two games between 
StoneGrid and gnugo3pt7 (rounds 3 and 7).  I am fairly sure that GNU Go 
does clean-up correctly, so I suspect that StoneGrid doesn't.

TimeWaster (one of Aloril's delinquent bots) is somehow able to abuse 
the clean-up system.  At the end of every game, it claims that all its 
opponent's stones are dead, and that its own stone (it never has more 
than one on the board) is alive.  Then the game enters the clean-up 
phase, there is one pass, and the players make their claims again.  This 
repeats indefinitely.
     My understanding is that this shouldn't be possible.  Once the game 
has entered the clean-up phase, there should be no more claims, all 
stones still on the board when play stops for the second time should be 
treated as alive.

Nick
-- 
Nick Wedd    nick at maproom.co.uk