Some comments

[Florian Richoux]

Hi guys,

Thanks again to the organizers of the In and CIG competitions for their
great job. I would like to discuss about two points for future events:

- First, I think it was very important to accept open-source bots only,
since I don't see how one can contribute to the research in AI for games
by hiding code. Please, get going this way!

- In my opinion, it is also important for bots to learn about their
opponents. That is why it would be great if next year competitions allow
bots to read, write and keep files after games, by example by assigning
a given bot to a specific computer during all the tournament. I realize
it would considerably decrease the number of games performed, but do we
really need to play 360 games for each bot? If we look at the AIIDE
competition, after 150 ~ 180 games, win percentages (and then the
ranking) remained stable.

What do you think about that?
Cheers,
Flo

[Dave Churchill]

We have planned a system for next year's AIIDE tournament that will
allow for bots to write to files during games, and to read from files
of previous rounds. (This all of course depends on whether we have
anything to do with next year's tournament)

I am 90% sure that we will be able to do this without significant
impact on the number of games being played.

Apologies for not being able to do this for this year's tournament,
but we were still learning the technological challenges of automated
play up until the last minute.

Once we have implemented and tested the system we will release the
full details, but here is the current plan:

1) Bots will be given a 'read' and 'write' folder local to the bot
dll. Bots only have read and write permissions to those folders
directly.

2) Bots will be required to write to files in the write directory
which have a naming scheme unique to their current opponent.

3) After a round has finished, all files will be moved from the write
directory into the read directory and the gameID will be added to the
beginning of each file.

4) No games from the next round robin may be scheduled until all games
from the current round are completed. This keeps everything fair to
all bots.

5) Bots may not read from the write directory. This keeps things fair
for bots playing simultaneous games.

This will allow bots to write even if games are simultaneously
scheduled. Net result is that you can access data from games from
previous rounds only. Bots will be required to scan the read
directories for files they may have created in some clever way.

I think that this is the most logically and technically sound way of
doing this which has the least impact on tournament progress, as the
maximum time between rounds would then be the maximum game time limit.

Your comments are appreciated :)

--
-------------------------------
Dave Churchill
cda...@cs.ualberta.ca
dave.ch...@gmail.com

That's the thing about people who say they hate computers. What they
really hate is lousy programmers.

[Dave Churchill]

Just to add to the # of games played: more games is never bad. I will
do my best to press for enforcing high speed games in the future to
play tens of thousands of games if possible.

Statistical significance is very important!

[gabriel synnaeve]

I agree with Florian, particularly the fact that we need to be able to
save things about previous games. The Broodwar meta-game is balanced
only on BO3+ matches.

Aside from that, I also want to thank this year's AIIDE and CIG
competitions organizers: Mike Preuss, Tobias Mahlmann, Dave Churchill
and Michael Buro.

Cheers,
Gabriel

[Florian Richoux]

Sounds very good! Just a detail, but we have time to talk about it:
writing files about previous matches is essentially (IMO) for
remembering, when we play against a given bot, what strategies it used.
Thus, it may be a good idea to name these files with the opponent name
to make easier this search.

Le 04/09/2011 14:43, Dave Churchill a �crit :

[gabriel synnaeve]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 11:03 PM, Florian Richoux
<florian...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds very good! Just a detail, but we have time to talk about it: writing
> files about previous matches is essentially (IMO) for remembering, when we
> play against a given bot, what strategies it used. Thus, it may be a good
> idea to name these files with the opponent name to make easier this search.

""" Bots will be required to write to files in the write directory
which have a naming scheme unique to their current opponent """

I think it is intended to be the same for the read directory. Dave?

Gabriel