On 2, Jan 2007, at 11:42 PM, Chrilly wrote:
The Cotsen Open has a cash prize for the best computer program,
which I felt somewhat guilty accepting after loosing all games due
to the bug, but SlugGo was the only program entered this year, and
the cash did help to offset the cost of renting the wheelchair van
with hydraulic ramp that I needed to transport the cluster.
Why does SlugGo not play remote? E.g the only thing I transported
to London for playing against GM Adams was a notebook. The Hydra-
Cluster would have been a little bit difficult to transport. Even
in Abu-Dhabi the operating is remote. The Hydra-Sheikh sits in his
palace and the Cluster is in another part of the town.
Its for the chess-engine completly transparent. The engine writes/
reads to stdout/stdin. If the GUI is on the same PC, the
communication is directly done. When playing remote SSH (Secure
Shell) is started and the rest goes as before.
and
On 3, Jan 2007, at 6:33 AM, steve uurtamo wrote:
i guess this question has already been asked, but i'm really curious
now -- did the organizers want for the hardware to be on-site for the
games to be played (i.e. to prevent cheating), or did you just want
to bring the hardware on-site? or maybe there was no internet
connection in the room where games were played?
SlugGo can be run remotely. As Chrilly says, the technical problems are
very small and easy to deal with.
While I did not ask the organizers or Tournament Director of the Cotsen
Open about their specific requirements, I was told explicitly by the
Gifu,
Japan, TD's and the Computer Olympiad organizers that remote computing
would not be allowed. The CO folks were very blunt, while the Gifu folks
were far more Asian in the way they apologized for their inability to
accommodate remote computing. The Gifu prize of about $3,000 US is
probably enough to inspire some to cheat, but their claim is lack of
internet
access ... inside of a building that is a high-tech center.
I believe that computer Go is just too immature of a field, and the
level
of play is too low for trust to be the model. It is just too easy to
"hide the
midget in the Turk." As per the cartoon in the New Yorker, "On the
internet
nobody knows that you are a dog" (said by one dog sitting at a
computer to
another dog standing nearby). In chess the number of people who could be
effective against a GM while hidden on the other end of a wire is far
too
small, and their pride would prevent their participation because
giving the
win to the computer would not be acceptable. It is just too easy to
find a
1k human with more interest in the money.
So, I built a cluster that can travel. It is 24 G4 mac minis and a
dual G5
X-Serve in a rolling rack that is a bit under a meter cube and weighing
slightly in excess of 100 kg. It is a horrible tangle of wires, so in
the
post Sept/11 travel environment I decided not to take it to the Gifu
this
year (I even think it looks like a bomb more than a traveling
cluster). I
plan to update the hardware, hopefully sometime this year, so that I can
take it to the Gifu next year.
It is also a maintenance nightmare, so in the slow KGS tournament played
recently, only 22 of the minis were running. Our big non-transportable
cluster (72 G5's) was busy with physics at the time of the slow KGS
tournament.
Cheers,
David
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
computer-go@computer-go.org
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
