Shokidoki wins gold medal in Yokohama

[hgm]

Thanks. Do you also have the names of Rigan and Mattari_Yucha operators from the Mini Shogi award ceremony?

Photos day 4

The 1/128 Rigan operator on the left is Nakamichi Takashi. On the right is the author of Mattari Yucha, prof. Kotani. Mattari Yucha seems to mean something like "Easy-going Johnny", if I understood prof. Kotani's explanation correctly. 'Rigan' is an old Japanese distance measure (about 4 km), still used in the expression "I can see 1000 Rigan" when something is clear. So the name indicates the program only has 1/128 x 4km of clear vision.

[JBNielsen]

Congrats HG!!!

[jshriver]

Congradulations! Must have been an amazing time to be there.

[Gerd Isenberg]

And a second Gold medal with HaChu in Chu Shogi.
Congrats again, HGM! And one more name request, who is the DeepNikita (general game player?) guy?

[hgm]

That is Andrew Lin, a very enthusiastic American, who participated in many other games as well (Draughts, Surakarta, mini-Shogi, Clobber, Lines of Action, Reversi). For Reversi he had no opponents, though, so that tourney was cancelled. He got into game programming because the previous boy-friend of his gir- friend was a Reversi champion, and he wanted to scare him away. (So he told us.) I think all his programs were new, so none of them was very strong.

The Chu tourney was a bit of a disappointment: neither of us originally had planned to participate with our Chu programs (which we did not really consider in good-enough state yet). But we were pressed to do so by Apollo Hogan, who authored a program ChuPacabra, and wanted to have an opponent. (He approached me, and I later dragged in Andrew when I learned he also had started working on a Chu-Shogi program.) And then Apollo cancelled a few days before the event...

I had much more advance warning that I would have had to face ChuPacabra than Andrew, so I was able to squeeze in 2 months of intensive development of HaChu between my work on Shokidoki. When Apollo first approached me it was not much more than a fixed-depth alpha-beta search without real QS, (just 2 extra ply of capture search), no hash table, no account of promotability in its eval... (Good enough to crush most human players on the 81Dojo server, though, and even in much demand by the stronger players as a sparring partner for sharpening their game, playing it at 10 sec per move.) In these two months I equipped it with a hash table, null move, killer heuristic, LMR, serious evaluation, learning a lot from the strategies the stronger humans used to beat it.

So it basically crushed Deep Nikita, which did have nothing like a QS, not even capture extension. But in the first game, when the equivalent of about 5 Queens ahead, it played an illegal move, so I forfeited that game. (There is a rule that says if you don't promote when you enter the promotion zone, you will not be allowed to promote that same piece on the next turn with a non-capture, and it did just that. Turned out my test for entering the zone did not take account of whose zone it was, so the slider moving from the opponent's zone into its own was not considered entry of the zone!) This was very embarrasing, but I fixed it, and it then won the other game. And Andrew was so intimidated by its tactical superiority, (and so tired), that he pre-emptively resigned the playoff that would have been necessary.

[Gerd Isenberg]

Thanks.

He he he, Andrew seemed very busy on some photos, probably playing multiple games simultaneously. Who is the "Tornado" Lady from 10x10 Draughts?

[Henk]

And a second Gold medal with HaChu in Chu Shogi.
Congrats again, HGM! And one more name request, who is the DeepNikita (general game player?) guy?

Is the man on the right worshipping the winners ?

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

And a second Gold medal with HaChu in Chu Shogi.
Congrats again, HGM! And one more name request, who is the DeepNikita (general game player?) guy?

Is the man on the right worshipping the winners ?

Indeed he does

[gerold]

The ICGA mini-Shogi tournament, with 8 participants, under which the 4-fold unofficial World Champion (i.e. the UEC Cup winner), was won by Shokidoki with a perfect 7/7 score. So my trip to Japan was not in vain!

Nice work. Congratulation. Nice photos also.

Best,
Gerold.

[hgm]

Who is the "Tornado" Lady from 10x10 Draughts?

I did not pay too much attention to the draughts. I think she operated the winning program, and was the wife of one of the draughts programmers. But I have not seen the programmer of the winning program around. (I have talked a bit to all Draughts participants in the 2011 Tilburg Olympiad, so I suppose I would recognize him if I saw him.) So I am not sure if it was actually his wife, who came alone (which seems strange, but not impossible, if the guy was somehow tied up by his job), or the wife of the author that was there (assisting to make sure he would have opponents...).