Computer Go

Computer Go Tournaments on KGS

In Spring 2005, a series of monthly Computer Go Tournaments started on KGS. The results of past ones and the schedule of future ones are given on this site.

This page gives some details of these tournaments.

Schedule of Tournaments

KGS Computer Go Tournaments will be held about once a month. Those already scheduled are listed here.

Format of Tournaments

Day of the Week

We expect tournaments taking less than one day to be held on Sundays.

Time of Day

Tournament schedules will change from tournament to tournament, in an attempt to accommodate all timezones.

Board Size

We will hold 19x19 and 9x9 tournaments. These may alternate.

Time Limits

For each board size we plan eventually to use not more than two, and maybe only one, time system. But while we are finding out what works best, we may try a variety of time systems.

As the person responsible for the schedule, I prefer Absolute time. With any other system, you can't predict when a round will end, so you can't know when to start the next one. This is not such a big deal with over- the-board tournaments, if one game uses lots of overtime you just keep everyone waiting until they have finished and then draw the next round. But KGS's automated tournament system requires to be told in advance when each round will begin.

For tournaments that take place in a single session, I shall stick with Absolute time. For tournaments played at one round a day, or "around the clock" with generous gaps between rounds, I shall try Canadian overtime. We may need more judges before we run around-the-clock tournaments on KGS.

Pairing System

At present, all tournaments will be Swiss. Once KGS supports Round Robin (all-play-all) tournaments, I may use these.ed.

Rules

All tournaments will use Chinese (area) rules. Programs are encouraged to play on, filling their own territory if necessary, until the status of all groups is clear and the same to both players.

Uniqueness of Entrants

It is easy to download GNU Go and use it to create a bot that plays on KGS. There are at the time of wring (March 2005) a couple of dozen such bots. We do not want multiple copies of GNU Go competing in the same event, so we have a policy on duplicate entries. This was suggested by Gunnar Farnebäck:

A drevative work will be accepted into a KGS Computer Go Tournament if

All copyright holders agree that they want it to enter the tournament
the copyright holders can convince the tournament director that it is indeed unique enough to be interesting.

For tournaments for which I am Tournament Director, I expect to decide as follows:

If two entrants both use the same fuseki library, and the copyright-holder of that library (if any) wants both to enter the tournament, I shall not see this as a reason to bar either.
If two entrants both use Thomas Wolf's GoTools, and Thomas wants both to enter the tournament, I shall probably not see this as a reason to bar either.
If two entrants are both based on GNU Go, and I am not convinced that they are greatly different, I shall ask a representative of GNU Go to choose just one of them.

The final decision will always be at the discretion of the Tournament Director.

Prevention of cheating

If someone wants to cheat in a Computer Go Tournament held on a server, it is not easy to stop them. One easy way to cheat would be to write a program that is capable of receiving "hints" from its human operator.

There are things that can be done to make cheating harder. But for these monthly tournaments, where there is no prize and little incentive to cheat, we don't bother. If summon is suspected of cheating, the harm this does to their reputation will outweigh any conceivable benefit.

We expect to hold a sponsored KGS Computer Go Tournament, with prize money, later this year. The sponsor will decide what steps to take to deter cheating.

How to Enter

This site gives some guidance on how to connect a Go-playing program to KGS and how to cause a Go-playing program to play in a tournament.

To enter your program for a particular tournament, you should follow this advice, register for the tournament as listed on the KGS Tournaments list, and ensure that it turns up, in the KGS Computer Go room, at least two minutes before the scheduled start of play.

Here is a list of programs which have already registered for at least one KGS Computer Go Tournament. This is mainly for my own use.