Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
(a) Much software downloadable from the internet is legal (think gGo, GnuGo, linux, etc), therefore downloading it from the internet is not necessarily piracy. (b) Most of the sums of money I've seen for competitions are trivial (except the Ing Prize). This might easily change if/when computer go programs reach high dan level. (c) There is a large market for Go equipment. I've been told that go sets are Nintendo's #1 selling product line. I've never bought go equipment in asia, but the market seems huge. (d) If I woke up tomorrow with a winning go program, I'd be tempted to market it as a service. There certainly seems to be a large market for go services in asia. If you have what you think is a winning computer-go program, I suggest you invest in a business plan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan) sooner rather than later. cheers On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 8:53 PM, Michael Gherrity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have read that the amount of money that a winning computer go program > would make in a go tournament is insignificant compared to the amount of > money that such a program would earn selling to the general public. I have > also read that the biggest pirates of computer software come from Germany, > the UK, and the US. The foreign exchange student we are hosting from Beijing > China said that most people in China do not buy software, but download it > for free off the net. > > So what is true? > > mike > ___ > 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/
Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
Commercial market for Go software is in Japan in Korea. Western player do not make significant numbers and Chinese probably find bettre uses for money - although there more reach Chinese people than people in Finland. Petri 2008/11/21 Michael Gherrity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hi, > > I have read that the amount of money that a winning computer go program > would make in a go tournament is insignificant compared to the amount of > money that such a program would earn selling to the general public. I have > also read that the biggest pirates of computer software come from Germany, > the UK, and the US. The foreign exchange student we are hosting from Beijing > China said that most people in China do not buy software, but download it > for free off the net. > > So what is true? > > mike -- Petri Pitkänen e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
[computer-go] RE : UCT RefBot
I think that most people trying go-programming will try at least to experiment once with UCT. The first logical step, is to build an amaf-bot. The other logical step, is to build a UCT bot. That's exactly the path i followed. And i bet many others have done that too. So it may be guessed that many more will do so. I feel that the most important thing is to be able to be rightly confident that the implementation is roughly right. It's true that an implementation can also serves as a basis for something else. But that will not be possible if you can't get a strong confidence that it is rightly done. So i guess that you should keep things as simple as you can in your reference-implementation. Litles tweaks will be easily doable after you get the specification understandable once. For exemple, i do not think that the "explore the pass" lines are a must have. You can test an UCT implementation that never pass as long as there are "valid" moves left. (valid in the sense nor suicide, nor pseudo-eyes). That's simple. And yet i think the program can play strongly enougth (given enougth simulations are made - Say 50 000). UCT has many constants built in. (By the way, i don't really understand those 2 and 10 factors. Wouldn't that go in the exploration-factor ?? as *sqrt(1/5) ). I guess that any value would be good enougth, as long as it makes the behavior of the bot rather clear. So other people can adjust this factor, and compare their results. If later on, after the implementation has cought some attention, if one value get to be known as better, it'll still be time to put it in. It probably won't be a big fuss to adjust anyone's implementation to it anyway. You have to set up a conventionnal value that people can use as a reference, be it bad. SO 1.0 (or sqrt(1/5) would be Okay i suppose). I don't think that wasting simulations in the end-game is really a problem for a reference implementation. The main problem i spot, is that you may need a fair number of simulations, to get some inter implementations reproducible data. Not everyone will be able or willing to put so much computing power to that usage. But even then, to have a reference specification will never be a loss. Especially once the AMAF-reference-specification start to get it's own pages (if it's not already the case : i have always have great trouble to track out all the links. Maybe it would be good to put it as a CGOS partner or something :) Then all people have to know is where to find CGOS. So the goal of the UCT-reference would be to be presented along with the AMAF-reference, with all the data that has been collected about how to make "sure" that one implementation behavior is correct. And also maybe, along with some popular boost (like the weight for the AMAF-ref), or a Basic way of making RAVE work with it. But that'll be later. _ Téléphonez gratuitement à tous vos proches avec Windows Live Messenger ! Téléchargez-le maintenant ! http://www.windowslive.fr/messenger/1.asp___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
Re: [computer-go] Re: UCT RefBot
On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 01:34 +, Claus Reinke wrote: > As a relative beginner in these matters, the more I look at AMAF, > the less I like it, and I think that has to do with AMAF ignoring > relative sequencing. By looking at all moves as if they were played > first, it ignores that some moves only make sense after certain other > moves. I feel the same way, but the bottom line is that it WORKS. It works incredible well in fact. I was hard pressed to prove that just looking at the FIRST move only is better, although intuitively I'm sure it is. What you do is only look at the first move if you want to be anal about it.Or if you have lots of time only look at the first move. Or you can be adaptive about it. Look at ALL moves then as the number of playouts increase, gradually give less and less priority to the remaining moves. Michael Williams suggested de-emphasizing later moves but still using them and this works quite well. - Don signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 23:53 -0800, Michael Gherrity wrote: > Hi, > > I have read that the amount of money that a winning computer go > program would make in a go tournament is insignificant compared to the > amount of money that such a program would earn selling to the general > public. I have also read that the biggest pirates of computer software > come from Germany, the UK, and the US. The foreign exchange student we > are hosting from Beijing China said that most people in China do not > buy software, but download it for free off the net. My first chess program only sold a few copies in Europe. But I came to find out that thousands of people had a copy of it.I met many people in Europe who said they had a copy and many of their friends did. Someone pointed me a site where you could download it for free. For some reason I believed that Europeans in general would be more honest about stuff like this and that we were "wild" and violent, they were more civilized (we have guns like you wouldn't believe, they have very few) etc.Maybe we are more violent but more honest too? But I know that as a culture we are not very honest either ... - Don > So what is true? > > mike > ___ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
Re: [computer-go] RE : UCT RefBot
On 21-nov-08, at 09:34, Denis fidaali wrote: I think that most people trying go-programming will try at least to experiment once with UCT. The first logical step, is to build an amaf-bot. The other logical step, is to build a UCT bot. That's exactly the path i followed. And i bet many others have done that too. So it may be guessed that many more will do so. I feel that the most important thing is to be able to be rightly confident that the implementation is roughly right. It's true that an implementation can also serves as a basis for something else. But that will not be possible if you can't get a strong confidence that it is rightly done. So i guess that you should keep things as simple as you can in your reference-implementation. Litles tweaks will be easily doable after you get the specification understandable once. For exemple, i do not think that the "explore the pass" lines are a must have. You can test an UCT implementation that never pass as long as there are "valid" moves left. (valid in the sense nor suicide, nor pseudo- eyes). That's simple. And yet i think the program can play strongly enougth (given enougth simulations are made - Say 50 000). UCT has many constants built in. (By the way, i don't really understand those 2 and 10 factors. Wouldn't that go in the exploration-factor ?? as *sqrt(1/5) ). I guess that any value would be good enougth, as long as it makes the behavior of the bot rather clear. So other people can adjust this factor, and compare their results. If later on, after the implementation has cought some attention, if one value get to be known as better, it'll still be time to put it in. It probably won't be a big fuss to adjust anyone's implementation to it anyway. You have to set up a conventionnal value that people can use as a reference, be it bad. SO 1.0 (or sqrt(1/5) would be Okay i suppose). I don't think that wasting simulations in the end-game is really a problem for a reference implementation. The main problem i spot, is that you may need a fair number of simulations, to get some inter implementations reproducible data. Not everyone will be able or willing to put so much computing power to that usage. But even then, to have a reference specification will never be a loss. Especially once the AMAF-reference- specification start to get it's own pages (if it's not already the case : i have always have great trouble to track out all the links. Maybe it would be good to put it as a CGOS partner or something :) Then all people have to know is where to find CGOS. So the goal of the UCT-reference would be to be presented along with the AMAF- reference, with all the data that has been collected about how to make "sure" that one implementation behavior is correct. And also maybe, along with some popular boost (like the weight for the AMAF- ref), or a Basic way of making RAVE work with it. But that'll be later. Denis, I agree with most of what you write. But there's a bit of friction between two of the goals. On the one hand a reference implementation is ideally as simple as possible. On the other hand you need to take limited computing power into account for testing. For testing new ideas you want your base-line (which will be something similar to the reference-bot) to have as good a strength/CPU-time ratio as possible. The simplest and cleanest would be a UCT-search without AMAF (or RAVE). But if it turns out AMAF would give a big boost in strength for virtually the same performance I think it should be considered. In my search implementation AMAF adds something like 20-30 lines of code in a single place, so the impact on the complexity is not so large. So far I'm still testing whether AMAF actually adds much or not. But if it turns out it doesn't it will be easy to remove. With regards to the formula sqrt( 2 * (log(parent-visits) / (10* visits)) I admit I simply copied it from somewhere and never properly thought about it. so you're correct that in fact I'm using a exploration-factor of sqrt(1/5) instead of 1.0. I'll modify my code to make this more clear. Mark ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
> From: Michael Gherrity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > I have read that the amount of money that a winning computer go program would > make in a go tournament is insignificant compared to the amount of money that > such a program would earn selling to the general public. That is obviously true. Prizes are measured in hundreds or perhaps thousands, whereas a top program can sell hundreds of thousands of copies, at $50 per; especially if there is a Japanese-language version. The author of Many Faces of Go, David Fotland, once posted some numbers to this list, if I recall correctly; they were fairly impressive, and certainly far greater than the prize money itself. But the prize certainly increases marketability and profits. > I have also read that the biggest pirates of computer software come from > Germany, the UK, and the US. > The foreign exchange student we are hosting from Beijing China said that most > people in China do not buy software, but download it for free off the net. > > So what is true? I don't have numbers regarding software piracy; I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to know how many bootleg copies of software are out there, unless the software somehow leaves footprints - for instance, it may "phone home", or may need to access a server for some purpose. Microsoft, I think, has numbers of people who upgrade Windows, versus the number of copies actually purchased. Maybe this explains the quantity of bugs in initial releases -- incentive to phone home for security upgrades? My thinking is that it is better to encourage people to support authors than to spend a great deal of effort making software unusable. ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
Americans have, generally speaking, more respect for the rights of others - and guns play a part in that, since many of us choose to defend our rights directly. As Heinlein wrote: "An armed society is a polite society." Google "pink pistols" and "terry mcintyre" if you wish. I say "in general", but there are of course subcultures which have a lot less respect for peace and honesty than others. There was a fellow who sold bagels in office buildings in Washington, DC; customers paid on the honor system by dropping money into a box. A line to an article about his experiences is below. Paul F. found that 80-90% of customers would voluntarily drop money into a box to pay for his products. He also discovered that people in "higher" executive offices were less honest than the more "ordinary" working stiffs. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E1DA1431F935A35755C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1 Terry McIntyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- Libertarians Do It With Consent! - Original Message > From: Don Dailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 23:53 -0800, Michael Gherrity wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I have read that the amount of money that a winning computer go > > program would make in a go tournament is insignificant compared to the > > amount of money that such a program would earn selling to the general > > public. I have also read that the biggest pirates of computer software > > come from Germany, the UK, and the US. The foreign exchange student we > > are hosting from Beijing China said that most people in China do not > > buy software, but download it for free off the net. > > My first chess program only sold a few copies in Europe. But I came to > find out that thousands of people had a copy of it.I met many people > in Europe who said they had a copy and many of their friends did. > Someone pointed me a site where you could download it for free. > > For some reason I believed that Europeans in general would be more > honest about stuff like this and that we were "wild" and violent, they > were more civilized (we have guns like you wouldn't believe, they have > very few) etc.Maybe we are more violent but more honest too? But I > know that as a culture we are not very honest either ... > > - Don > ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
RE: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
I've sold 3 copies of Many Faces of Go in China, but when I travel to China I check in computer stores, they always have it available for a low price. I have a collection of Chinese versions of Many Faces, one with a 30 page Chinese language manual explaining all the features in Chinese. I would say that for computer go, China is the biggest pirate. For version 11 I had very simple copy protection. It only worked if you installed it from the CD - copying the exe was not enough. The CD image was over 30 MB, and in 2002, that was too much for most people to email or download. Today that size is file is easy to transmit. Last year I saw sales of version 11 go down to about 1/3 of what they were. Some of this is due to the age of the program, but a lot must be due to piracy. This is why version 12 has copy protection. I don't like copy protection, but the ease of making free copies requires it. Prizes in computer go today are small or nonexistent. The ICGA world championship makes you pay to enter. David > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:computer-go- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Don Dailey > Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 5:34 AM > To: computer-go > Subject: Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program > > On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 23:53 -0800, Michael Gherrity wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I have read that the amount of money that a winning computer go > > program would make in a go tournament is insignificant compared to the > > amount of money that such a program would earn selling to the general > > public. I have also read that the biggest pirates of computer software > > come from Germany, the UK, and the US. The foreign exchange student we > > are hosting from Beijing China said that most people in China do not > > buy software, but download it for free off the net. > > My first chess program only sold a few copies in Europe. But I came to > find out that thousands of people had a copy of it.I met many people > in Europe who said they had a copy and many of their friends did. > Someone pointed me a site where you could download it for free. > > For some reason I believed that Europeans in general would be more honest > about stuff like this and that we were "wild" and violent, they were more > civilized (we have guns like you wouldn't believe, they have > very few) etc.Maybe we are more violent but more honest too? But I > know that as a culture we are not very honest either ... > > - Don > > > > So what is true? > > > > mike > > ___ > > 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/
RE: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
My sales in Japan through AI IGO are 10x or more the sales of Many Faces English. English sales are about evenly split between USA and Europe. I have more sales to Finland than to China. David > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:computer-go- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Petri Pitkanen > Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 12:23 AM > To: computer-go > Subject: Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program > > Commercial market for Go software is in Japan in Korea. Western player > do not make significant numbers and Chinese probably find bettre uses > for money - although there more reach Chinese people than people in > Finland. > > Petri > > 2008/11/21 Michael Gherrity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Hi, > > > > I have read that the amount of money that a winning computer go program > > would make in a go tournament is insignificant compared to the amount of > > money that such a program would earn selling to the general public. I have > > also read that the biggest pirates of computer software come from Germany, > > the UK, and the US. The foreign exchange student we are hosting from Beijing > > China said that most people in China do not buy software, but download it > > for free off the net. > > > > So what is true? > > > > mike > > > > -- > Petri Pitkänen > e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ___ > 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/
Re: [computer-go] Selling a computer go program
On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 07:53 -0800, terry mcintyre wrote: > Americans have, generally speaking, more respect for the rights of > others - and guns play a part in that, since many of us choose to > defend our rights directly. As Heinlein wrote: "An armed society is a > polite society." I don't want to get into a political discussion here - but I did start it! > > > Google "pink pistols" and "terry mcintyre" if you wish. > > I say "in general", but there are of course subcultures which have a > lot less respect for peace and honesty than others. > > There was a fellow who sold bagels in office buildings in Washington, > DC; customers paid on the honor system by dropping money into a box. A > line to an article about his experiences is below. Paul F. found that > 80-90% of customers would voluntarily drop money into a box to pay for > his products. He also discovered that people in "higher" executive > offices were less honest than the more "ordinary" working stiffs. I can believe that. The Detroit top executives went to Washington asking for bail-out money - but they flew there in their private jets and this offended some of the congressmen there. It seemed crass to me too. Even if I had a private jet I think I would have at least not been so undignified about it. - Don signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
[computer-go] Handtalk's Chen Zhixing
The following was posted on Sensei's Library: "Prof. Chen passed away at Oct 12, 2008, at the age of 77." Can anyone confirm or deny? Ian ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
Re: [computer-go] UCT RefBot
I have done a bit more testing and some things start to become a little more clear to me. But I still have some open questions. What I did was to rewrite my search such that I can set a constant that determines after how many simulations the tree gets expanded. And I have a switch to turn AMAF on or off. When the tree is expanded always with no AMAF this should behave the same as my original search algorithm. There's one caveat though. In the UCT formula sqrt( 2 * (log(parent-visits) / (10* visits)) the number of visits can not be zero of course. In my original implementation this was never the case, as it always did a simulation and update of the visit count upon expansion of a node. In the new implementation when expansion occurs it creates many nodes with a visit-count of zero. So I have to have a provision: if (visits==0) return MAX_VALUE; That will guarantee it to behave the same as my original allgorithm. I have tested enough games now that I'm reasonably confident that they are indeed the same. This provision overwhelmes any value in visited nodes. That is actually by design of course, forcing all the moves at the current depth to be visited at least once before expanding a level deeper. But when using AMAF you want to postpone visiting nodes as long as possible as long as you seem to have a very good candidate. I have a strong suspicion that in my current tests UCT+AMAF shows a playing level very close to just plain UCT simply because MAX_VALUE overwhelmes any AMAF statistics gathered. So I think if we're going to make AMAF part of the reference definition of a UCT search bot, then we need some consensus about what is a good formula for the 'virtual-value'. Especially for the case where vists==0. I call it 'virtual-value' where a node-value is virtual-value + win/visits. Part of virtual-value will be the UCT value, part of it will be based on the virtual-win/virtual-visits ratio. I can probably invent such a formula myself but I'd be interested to hear what people that have had a UCT-AMAF bot a bit longer are using that has been tried and tested. Mark ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
Re: [computer-go] Handtalk's Chen Zhixing
I read it on Chinese news and forums as well. On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Ian Osgood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The following was posted on Sensei's Library: > > "Prof. Chen passed away at Oct 12, 2008, at the age of 77." > > Can anyone confirm or deny? > > Ian > > ___ > 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/
[computer-go] On Don Dailey's first chess program
Dear Don, sorry to step in here, but I can't believe what you write. So I would like to know some facts. > My first chess program only sold a few copies in Europe. What was the name of your program? In which year was it published? For what platform had it been? > But I came to find out that thousands of people had a copy of it. To which countries of Europe were your contacts? (Europe is NOT one big uniform block...) > I met many people in Europe who said they had a copy and > many of their friends did. I was a very active chess software use for many years. I never had heard that you had written some commercial program. (I only know about Star Socrates - where you were involved - and which was runner-up in the 1995 World Championships.) > Someone pointed me a site where you could download it for free. Which was that site? Ingo, European without pirated software. -- Sensationsangebot nur bis 30.11: GMX FreeDSL - Telefonanschluss + DSL für nur 16,37 Euro/mtl.!* http://dsl.gmx.de/?ac=OM.AD.PD003K11308T4569a ___ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
