There has been some discussion about which additional board sizes to use for the server once it is running.
Of course running all 3 board sizes is a possibility now that we will have server space, but my fear all along has been that they will kill each other. There is something to be said about numbers and you want as many programs as possible playing on the server you want to test on. Instead of asking for a lot of opinions however, I think it makes sense to put all 3 servers up and see what happens for a while. In other words you will vote with your participation. I think we will see that programs will gravitate more towards one server than another and I don't know which one that will be. If they all get reasonable usage I will leave them all up, but if one tends to get very little usage, I will bring it down later. I'll let them all stay up for a reasonable length of time. So there will be 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19, at least for the first month or so, depending on usage. For time controls, I have changed my previous position, I think I prefer somewhat faster time controls. There are disadvantages but almost many advantages. The foremost advantages is that I believe it encourages participation, more programs are likely to test on the server if they do not have to wait unduly long for solid results. Another advantage is that the games are more fun to watch. Right now, the time control for 9x9 assuming the average number of moves is roughly equivalent to the number of points on the board is about 3.7 seconds per move or 5 minutes. Using this same exact reasoning if we try to match the same rate of play per move we have this table: 9x9 - 300 seconds or 5 minutes 13x13 - 625 seconds or 10 minutes, 18 seconds. 19x19 - 1336 seconds or 22 minutes, 16 seconds per move. There is no particular reason that the time control has to be in multiples of 5 minutes except that we humans seems to be offended if things are rounded nicely for us. So we could accept those values as is, or we could round it to what to our sensibilities seems somehow more "normal" and use 5 minutes 10 minutes and 20 minutes for 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19 respectively. If we want to speed things up a bit, we might consider going from 3.7 seconds per move to 2.5 seconds per move. This gives the following approximate table: 9x9 - 202.5 seconds or 3 minutes, 22 seconds 13x13 - 422.5 seconds or 7 minutes 2 seconds 19x19 - 902.5 seconds or 15 minutes 2 seconds These could be rounded to 3 minutes, 7 minutes and 15 minutes or kept as is. There is some argument for making the bigger boards play faster based on the notion that you SHOULD play faster since the game will have a lot more moves in it. In this case, the time control could be set the same for all board sizes, perhaps 15 minutes per game or even 10 minutes per game. There is some appeal to having this kind of consistency, but of course the quality of the games on the big boards would suffer accordingly. Of course we don't care about absolute quality since we are testing programs against each other and we accept that they play much better at longer time controls. But we could set the average time per move faster if we were not comfortable with just making them all the same. We could do something like 5, 10, 15 or something like that. In addition to the time control, there is currently a 0.75 second gift which is configurable. The gift makes it possible for some programs with high latency connection issues to finish ridiculously long games without defaulting on time despite the fact that they are playing instantly. So fast time controls shouldn't be dominated by network speed considerations. My current default choice is: 9x9 - 5 minutes. (to keep it the same as it is.) 13x13 - 10 minutes. 19x19 - 15 or 20 minutes. Feedback? - Don - Don _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
