World Draughts Forum

Michel, this is beyond human understanding, at least beyond mine.
Do you have a move sequence how the story continues?
This must be zillions of ply, before black surrenders.

Bert

Joao, if I remember well this is also a move sometimes played by Flits.
And indeed it needs accurate play.
In the move sequence from Damage, I think it is already a loss after the initial exchange by Kingsrow.
But proving that is rather difficult.
Also not sure if this position or "simple" trap is ...

Here some notes on game 102.
See below the position after white (Kingsrow white, damage black) 11. 30-25


diagram_1.png

Black (Damage) now played 20-24?, and maybe already a decisive error.
This was followed by 12. 33-28 14-19 (think more or less forced, alternative 13-19).

Now Kingsrow ...

Another match with a Damage experimental version (version 18.1, without policy !).
Again against Kingsrow.
Same settings as usual (1 core, 1 min/80 moves, 6p DB, no book).
Match result (Damage perspective), 1 win (game 1), 1 lost (game 102), and 156 draws.
I will issue a separate post about the loss ...

Michel, nice work!
My next question would be, could a neural network encode this information (example 5x5), with 99% accuracy?
Or sufficient accuracy to win complicated endgames, or to draw endgames where you have an enormous problem.

Bert

Think that Sjende Blyn also uses that principle.
The settings for not losing (or winning) against Kingsrow are different from the settings to win (and not draw) against the weaker engines.
At least this is what I know.
I have no further details.
A pity that apparently there is no knob to turn which ...

With the policy network developed I asked Codex to optimize the LMR in relation to the policy output, in such a way that at least the number of nodes and/or time was reduced with 50%.

Codex did several experiments, the total time spent by Codex was around 1 hour.
I also asked Codex to write a ...

Another experiment was to develop a Policy Network. This is a network which provides the probability for all (legal) moves in a position. This can be used to sort moves and also use the value to guide LMR.

The tool was developed by Codex.

In this example the network was 90 (binary) inputs, 45 for ...

Joost, thanks for sharing.
It seems that we have reached a ceiling, until proven otherwise.
Also possible that there is still ELO te gain, but at huge resource-costs.
As we discussed often, larger networks come at a cost, but with the AI-hype, we can expect future processors to have better ...

Close to the record of 128 moves, see website Michel Grimminck.
But I expect this record to be beaten soon...

Bert

Another way of looking at it, the computer was able to learn high-level draughts by just playing against itself and started with a mediocre level.
It has never seen any game by humans.
And after 4 hours it reached almost world champion level (or at least grandmaster++).
Many years the verdict was ...

Joost, a very interesting result. Really curious where this will end. Without any doubt, Claude could also program the game runner, game converter and network training tools. So basically only the Draughts program remains.
Think we really grow towards a "game, set and match" situation is several ...

Very interesting, curious if the new DTM record will surpass 300 moves (600 ply).

Bert

Michel, you are right!
And it is not unlikely that in the end nothing will beat alpha-beta (at least for 10x10 international draughts).
But I wanted to understand MCTS somewhat better, and as Codex helped me to write the routines, I could do a quick test.
So not sure I want to spent much more energy ...

Today, I was playing around with MCTS.
A known (so far unsolved) characteristic of MCTS is that it hardly recognizes combination traps.
Also this time the MCTS version suffered from this short sight in a game against Kingsrow.
In this position white has played 29-23? and it is now black (Kingsrow ...