[Computer-go] Frisbee Go Simulation

["Ingo Althöfer"]

Hi Josef,
 

> ... I think that we do not need to ensure that the stone cannot land diagonally 
> by small epsilon, since ingo defined it s.t. it cannot. 

Exactly. "Frisbee Go Simulation" is not meant a realistic simuilation of
true Frisbee Go, but as an abstract testbed for a Go variant with random elements.

> Having small epsilon as you suggest makes any attempts at writing a specialized 
> frisbee-go code not really fruitful, since the displacement is quite rare; so 
> realistically, with small epsilon, no-one would probably bother to do anything 
> different than to run current programs unchanged.

Right. In particular, the idea is to play on 9x9 board in the Olympiad 2016.


> ... Moreover, larger epsilons change the game's dynamic s.t. it is easier to live 
> and harder to kill (hypothesis). Another thing is that the MCTS might work much 
> better with this setting (since random playouts are much more true).

I want to challenge this. From other games with random elements (for instance
"EinStein wurfelt nicht") it is known that specialized algorithms are much
better than simple adaptions of MCTS. 

> ingo: One note for rules (you should add) is that when players throw stone 
> to a location where the probability of landing on a valid location is exactly 
> zero (all 5 positions are stones or invalid) this counts as a pass 
> (otw, the loosing party might play the "non-voluntary pass" moves and make 
> the game infinite. (sorry if I overlooked someone mentioning this already) ...

SUch problems were the reason for my original formulation: not differentiating
between intended and unintended passes. Stop of phase 1 after two consecutive
passes. Completion of the game in normal Go mode in phase 2.

*************************
By the way. Michael Hartisch (from the Ulf Lorenz group at Siegen U) proposed
to have in the Olympiad one "Frisbee Go Simulation" participant which is a
normal Go bot. This bot will likely not win a medal, but its performance may
show how different (and difficult) Frisbee Go Simulation is from normal Go.


Regards, Ingo.