kvr@nikhefk.UUCP (kees van rijn) (10/06/87)
INTERCONTINENTAL COMPUTER - OTHELLO MATCH Last saturday there was a computer-othello match of MY TURN in The Netherlands with BILL in the USA. MY TURN has been written by Cas Wilders and won the preceding local mini-tournament in Amsterdam with REV87 (by Joost Buys), MAST87 (by Ron Kroonenberg) and BADIA1.2 (by Marcel van Tien). BILL is vice-champion of the USA since last US' tournament, some years ago. BILL has been written by Kai-Fu Lee and Sanjoy Mahajan. Communication between Pittsburgh USA and Amsterdam NL took place via EARN / BITNET. After this match, there were also games of REV87 and MAST87 with BILL via this communication channel. All games were won by BILL. In the first match MY TURN got low mobility because of a wrong move in the beginning. It was hopeless to continue and Cas resigned. For the other two games, the level of the participants was probably near equal, though initially REV87 had also problems with mobility, but it recovered. For non-experts in othello, like me, it is however very difficult to estimate the real value of a position. All of us agreed that it is a very hard job to improve strength of the programs further with known techniques. According to Kai-Fu, faster machines lead only to marginal improvement, and better search algorithm is too hard. We think that most improvement of last years is from implementation of specific othello knowledge into the programs. However, probably the level of present programs is so high, that in a tournament of best computer programs with best human players, computers will win more than 80% of the games. Technically, the communication channel was good, though exact time checking was impossible because of a delay of about 5 seconds before a move arrived. This time is not garanteed, and it is also not yet possible for the participants to check the time that a message was sent. Another problem was that backspaces from Amsterdam were not executed, but turned into periods, so that careful typing was required. We were later told that delete probably would have been effective. And sometimes, messages from other people were disturbing clear communication. Generally speaking however, the match passed off very successfully. kees van rijn (organizepon
kfl@speech2.cs.cmu.edu (Fu Lee) (10/07/87)
In article <248@nikhefk.UUCP>, kvr@nikhefk.UUCP (kees van rijn) writes: > > INTERCONTINENTAL COMPUTER - OTHELLO MATCH > > Last saturday there was a computer-othello match of > MY TURN in The Netherlands with > BILL in the USA. > .... Thanks to Kees for organizing this match, and for this accurate commentary. There were, however, a few misunderstandings which I hope to clarify. > All of us agreed that it is a very hard job to improve > strength of the programs further with known techniques. > According to Kai-Fu, faster machines lead only to marginal > improvement, and better search algorithm is too hard. Actually, I believe faster machines will lead to substantial improvement, as they did for chess. However, making othello hardware is not as fruitful since current programs already outplay humans, and since there are no incentives. I think an improved search algorithm is both more effective and intellectually satisfying. However, our attempts in the past year have not been encouraging. >We think that most improvement of last years is from implementation >of specific othello knowledge into the programs. Actually, the two major contributions from BILL are: (1) encoding all Othello knowledge into tables for fast evaluation, and (2) Bayesian learning of how to combine evaluation features. > kees van rijn > (organizer) Kai-Fu Lee