Gomocup 2004, the 5th tournament (April the 3rd, 2004)

Tournament 2004 took place on Saturday 3rd April in PC lab of Charles University in Prague, the same place as in 2003. We used celerons 1700MHz. The only competitors present was Jirka Fontan and me - Vojta Havranek. This was the first tournament where we used the new protocol. Martin Petricek, who tried to make a manager for both protocols, didn't have enough time to debug the program, which later caused several problems. There was plenty of new brains competing. This was the first time we had foreign competitors: Goro by Victor Barykin from Russia, and Bestmove by Wen XiangDong and Noesis by Mark Mammel, both from USA. There was also new Svine2, Hewer2, Qmentat1.5 and Pisq7. Bestmove and Hewer2 used the new protocol. We also changed the time limits. For the first time, there was a limit for match - 3 minutes, and the turn limit was prolonged to 30 seconds.

Because we did't have enough time, we decided to play just 4 matches for one duel. As we feared, there was a lot of bugs in the new manager. It didn't check the consumed time properly and it had big problems when two pbrains(brains for new protocol) matched each other. So we decided to let play the brains for old protocol agains each other using the old manager first. When I was putting down the results home, I discovered, that even the old manager has an error and it has unfortunately overwritten some of the replay files. Then, we played the duels of pbrains with them in the new manager. Finally, we tried to play the match of Bestmove with Hewer2, but the manager used to freeze after every single match. We had to play the four matches one by one. While watching the replay, the new manager shows false time data sometimes. The correct information is in the .rec files(see Readme.First!.txt).

The tournament was quite spectacular, and it seemed that the victory would take Svine2 or Goro. AI1000 sometimes made incorrect moves when the board was nearly filled and the game seemed to be a draw. Similar mistake was sometimes done by Benjamin, who is quite a defender, so the mistake was more apparent. 30 seconds for match was no problem, Bestmove was the only one, who used it fully. The match limit was sometimes a problem for the older brains, that weren't prepared for it(Trunkat, Puskvorec). The pbrains Bestmove and Hewer2 losed some matches because of match timeout too(Bestmove with Benjamin was a draw because of two timeouts.). The Noesis brain was very strong if it started the match, but if opponent started, Noesis's first move was too away from the first sign, that he often losed. Finally the tournament was won by Svine2, who defeated Goro and made draw with Bestmove. And so Jirka Fontan defended the title for once, even against very strong brains from abroad.

You can download replay of the 5th tournament(200KB) for windows Gomotur program.