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Author Topic: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory  (Read 10122 times)

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #15 on: March 21, 2016, 12:17:16 pm »

New OpenTafl release. This one adds support for nearly every engine protocol feature; the only one missing is errors raised by the engine. (They don't do anything at the moment; a fatal error will eventually be your engine's way of telling OpenTafl, "I can't do anything further, goodbye.")

I want to do a self-play tournament feature, to automate playing games between engines: not only is it a good springboard for running the real tournament down the line, it's also good for evaluating gains your AI makes (self-play is the best way to quantify if you've made it better or worse).

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #16 on: March 28, 2016, 08:51:09 pm »

There's another new release at the OpenTafl website. Two features which may be of interest to AI authors: first, OpenTafl now correctly sends 'goodbye' commands when it's done with external engines, which informs them when it's safe to quit; previously, it would spawn new processes without ever shutting down the old ones. No bueno. Second, there's a dedicated AI self-play mode, so you can test your engine against previous versions of itself, or against other engines; it'll print a summary at the end, and write out a game record for every game.

For non-AI authors, sorry, nothing new. I'm halfway to having save/load functionality, but unfortunately, I finished the easy half.

Parsely

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #17 on: March 30, 2016, 02:35:21 pm »

PTW
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Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #18 on: April 01, 2016, 11:18:43 am »

Post about features in the next version, which is not yet released, but not very far from it, either.

I'm super-excited about this one: it buttons up engine support and adds a fancy replay mode, for one. For another, it fixes a bunch of little problems that have turned up over time. It should drop in the next week or two, and I may decide to call v0.2.x done soon after. I really want to get to work on building network play, at which point OpenTafl will fill a specific need of mine—a friend and I have a weekly tafl game, and we live a few hundred miles away—and will be mostly ready to host the AI tournament in the winter, so I can get back to working on my AI.

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #19 on: April 02, 2016, 02:59:18 pm »

Turns out it was super-close. v0.2.3b! You can save and load games now.

Bauglir

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #20 on: April 02, 2016, 08:32:14 pm »

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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #21 on: April 10, 2016, 06:47:28 pm »

v0.2.4.xb: two new rules variants, and a way to display rules in-game! This latter, along with the two new annotated games included with the distribution, should make it much easier to learn how to play, if that's causing you trouble.

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #22 on: April 18, 2016, 10:32:34 am »

OpenTafl v0.2.4.5 has been released, and is now the stable version. Development will be on hold for a bit, while I tend to other software/writing projects I've let languish. In the next day or two, I plan to finalize the engine protocol and notation spec: any future revisions will be fully backward compatible, so you can design to a fixed target now.

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #23 on: April 26, 2016, 09:15:18 am »

The engine protocol has been finalized: any further changes will be either backward-compatible, or will only apply to engines which indicate that they support newer protocol versions.

In other news, I have the following official, committed entries:

1. Me, and OpenTafl's traditional alpha-beta/evaluation function AI. (OpenTafl will only play in the round-robin stage for reasons of fairness.)
2. My friend Shenmage, and his general-purpose neural network AI.
3. ags1, from the java-gaming.org forum, and a chess-style rules-based pruning/evaluation function AI.

If you're in-for-sure, let me know—I want to update the tournament page with who's going to be involved.

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #24 on: April 30, 2016, 03:08:04 pm »

I'm posting some handy resources in the thread at Java-Gaming.org: these include examples of full engine protocol interactions, and other possibly-interesting/useful material.

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #25 on: June 01, 2016, 08:02:33 am »

A month later, and network play should be coming very soon, probably in the next few weeks. (Using an AI as the local player, and spectator modes should follow after that.)

Source code has moved over to Bitbucket, too, for ease of use/contributions/issue tracking.

Amperzand

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #27 on: June 12, 2016, 07:58:50 pm »

PTW
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Muh FG--OOC Thread
Quote from: smirk
Quote from: Shadowlord
Is there a word that combines comedy with tragedy and farce?
Heiterverzweiflung. Not a legit German word so much as something a friend and I made up in German class once. "Carefree despair". When life is so fucked that you can't stop laughing.
http://www.collinsdictionary.com

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #28 on: June 16, 2016, 11:24:41 am »

v0.3.2.0b is released! This is the stable release for v0.3.x, and OpenTafl is unlikely to change much in its underlying mechanics between now and the tournament in December, so if you're interested in a good version to code against, this would be that one.

Fishbreath

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Re: Hnefatafl AI tournament - code your way to glory
« Reply #29 on: July 15, 2016, 08:52:04 pm »

OpenTafl v0.3.3.0b is released now, and this is actually really the final version in the v0.3.x series (less any required hotfixes). It adds further support for things like saved games and host settings to networked games.
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