I'm not so sure we need to have a really strong Anchor. The Anchor's role is to prevent rating drift over the long term. It I turned CGOS lose without any anchor, it could inflate or deflate over time and that was the only reason I wanted to have an anchor.
However, it makes sense for an Anchor to be close to the median strength of the players, otherwise it becomes like an Anchor attached to a long rubber band. It still anchors but there is too much wandering around. So I suggest that an upgrade is good, but it doesn't have to be top strength. I just did a quck estimate of the average strength of all the recent rated players and the average is close to 1600 if you throw out the negative rated players. This also coresponds roughly to the median player. I would still prefer favoring an Anchor that is more representative of stronger players as opposed to the simple heuristic players - so that pushes it up a bit more. When AnchorMan started out it was well above the median, now it's abot 100 ELO below give or take. A 1600 would be a big improvement and put it solidly into the median, but I think we want a couple of hundred above that to represent future improvements and build an Anchor around the stronger half. I think we need anything from 1800-2000 and this might be a version of gnugo with an enhanced highly varied opening book system. There are many versions of gnugo floating around. Which one is ggexp? Is is a version about to be released, part of the development cycle of gnugo? Or is there is a stronger version available? I could also put together a fixed version of Lazarus. Not the 2100 strength version but a version playing at a fixed level that would play the same strength on any computer. I could not run it on the server and I could not run it all the time from my home, but me might let 2 or 3 people run clones as Anchors. It would probably play about 1900 strength. In fact I could start preparing and testing a version that will hit this target strength. - Don On Sun, 2007-03-18 at 13:09 +0100, Sylvain Gelly wrote: > Hello Don, Nick, Magnus, > > I here answer the 3 previous emails. > > > 2007/3/18, Don Dailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Another possible candidate is Mogo, running at 3K play-outs, like the > > version running on CGOS right now. > > I thought about that, the good thing is the resources taken (between > 0.6 and 0.3 s per move), the problem is this limited version MoGo > seems to be too much "intransitive". > > > Do you think any version of gnugo is suitable as an anchor? > I think gnugo is a very good anchor and very difficult to overfit. It > is good that ggexp is always playing. Last version of gnugo would also > be good. As Magnus said, gnugo is maybe too deterministic, but this is > only an issue if someone try to "cheat" by creating an winning opening > against gnugo (I managed to find an opening which makes 100% against > gnugo). I don't believe it is a practical issue then. > > > On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 18:45 -0500, Nick Apperson wrote: > > > one concern i have is that within a family of programs (such as MC) > > > the estimated skill differences are overestimated. I would really > > > like to see an anchor that uses a different technique. I'm not > > > offering a solution. Thoughts? > > > > One idea is to measure this phenomenon to see how much we should > > be concerned by it. > You are right. And the results you have so far in addition with the > results in cgos can assess if it is wrong or right. > I agree it is bad to have only MC programs running on cgos, but do we > have a program > 2000 ELO which is not MC? Maybe a "solution" would be > to take gnugo for example, and give it an advantage to make it at 2000 > ELO (handicap or komi). This would however don't measure the level of > a program against a strong one, but the ability of a program to catch > up on a lost game. > > There is also the perspective of the 13x13 and 19x19 servers where (1) > gnugo will be much stronger, (2) we can have easily handicaps. > > Sylvain > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
