Gomocup 2018, the 19th tournament (April the 27th-29th, 2018)
The Gomocup 2018 took place on April the 27th-29th, sponsored by Tech Center of Light Speed & Quantum Studio, Tencent.
There were 5 computers available whose configurations were as follows:
- Windows 10, x64 Intel Core i7-6700K (4/4.2GHz), 8GB RAM
- Windows 10, x64 AMD Ryzen 1700X (3.4/3.8GHz), 16GB RAM
- Windows 10, x64 Dual Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 (2.0/3.0 GHz), 64GB RAM
- Windows 10, x64 Dual Intel Xeon E5-2660 v3 (2.6/3.3 GHz), 256GB RAM
- Windows 10, x64 Dual Intel Xeon E5-2660 v3 (2.6/3.3 GHz), 256GB RAM
For each game type, only cores with similar clock rates were used.
The openings for Gomocup 2018 were chosen by the following people (sorted alphabetically according to last names):
- Alexander Bogatirev - Gomoku player, member of Gomoku Committee RIF, member of organizers committee of Russian Gomoku Championship, winner of Russian Gomoku Cup 2016.
- Aivo Oll - Renju player, 7 dan, former Estonian champion, European champion, and world champion.
- Zijun Shu - Gomoku player and AI researcher, contributor of several Gomoku AIs.
- Tao Tao - Renju theory researcher, who published some researches and new designs of renju openings, participated in promotion of Renju and translated several Japanese renju books.
- Qichao Wang - Renju expert, 4 dan, who has done a lot of researches in renju openings.
- Rong Xiao - Gomoku expert who proposed the gomoku opening rule "swap after first move", which is one of the most popular gomoku opening rules in China.
Thank you all!
Same as last year, we prepared 12 openings for every rule.
- Openings for the freestyle league:
- Openings for the standard league:
- Openings for the renju league:
What is new?
- Updates
- Djall 2018 - A new version of Djall.
- Embryo 2018 - A lot of errors fixed, speed up, completely rewritten moves generator. Embryo uses part of the search function (highly Gomoku-modified) from Stockfish.
- Goro 2018 - Some weights were changed.
- Hewer 2018 - There were some changes in move-generator and minor change in evaluation function. Classic Alpha-Beta search with hash table and time management remains unchanged.
- SlowRenju 2018 - There are some small modifications on the evaluation, although not sure whether there is really an improvement.
- Whose 2018 - Fix the bug of takeback; Give up the calculation of VCF; Change the data structure; Optimize the algorithm.
- Wine 2018 - Algorithm performance is improved.
- XoXo 2018 - A bug is fixed and the algorithm is a bit improved. Added support for standard league.
- Yixin 2018 - The algorithm has been improved.
- New AI
- AlphaGomoku (Kozarzewski) - a Gomoku program developed by Maciej Kozarzewski from Poland. AlphaGomoku is based on AlphaGo Zero - MCTS with deep neural network trained from self play. AlphaGomoku supports freestyle rule.
- AlphaGomoku (Sun) - a Gomoku program developed by Gerry Sun from China. AlphaGomoku is based purely on deep neural network. AlphaGomoku supports freestyle rule. This year it only participants in fastgame league.
- DeepFire - a Gomoku program developed by Shuai Pan from China. DeepFire supports freestyle rule.
- Ego - a Gomoku program developed by Yan Tang from China. Ego is written in C++. Ego supports freestyle rule.
- Gofive - a Gomoku and Renju program developed by Xin Huang from China. Gofive supports freestyle, standard and renju rules.
- LightBlue - a Gomoku program developed by Erwan Simon from France. LightBlue supports freestyle rule.
- Rapfi - a Gomoku program developed by Haobin Duan from China. Rapfi supports freestyle rule.
- Whatateam - a Gomoku program developed by Fanny Tavart, Oscar Stefanini and Ronan Boiteau from France. Whatateam supports freestyle rule.
There were 4 freestyle groups, 1 fastgame group, 1 standard group, and 1 renju group this year. AIs were divided into different freestyle groups according to the placement in the last tournament. For freestyle 2, 3, 4, the top 4 AIs were moved up to the next group. If the top k (k>4) places were all taken by new (or updated) AIs in a group, then all these k AIs would advance to the next group.
Freestyle Ranking 2017
- YIXIN
- RENJUSOLVER
- GORO
- SLOWRENJU
- TITO
- HEWER
- ONIX
- SWINE
- CARBON
- WINE
- EMBRYO
- WHOSE
- PELA
- GMOTOR
- CHIS
- ZETOR
- KANEC
- XOXO
- EULRING
- JUDE
- PECUCHET
- SPARKLE
- QMENTAT
- PUSKVOREC
- NOESIS
- IMRO
- FASTGOMOKU
- PISQ
- DJALL
- LICHT
- STAHLFAUST
- PUREROCKY
- VALKYRIE
- CRUSHER
- FIVEROW
- PROLOG
- MUSHROOM
- BENJAMIN
In accordance with the last tournament, memory limit/time per move/per match were determined to be same as Gomocup 2017:
| TOURNAMENT | TIME LIMIT PER MOVE [S] | TIME LIMIT PER MATCH [S] | MEMORY LIMIT [MB] | BOARD SIZE | RULE FOR WIN |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freestyle 1 league | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Freestyle 2 league | 30 | 180 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Freestyle 3 league | 30 | 180 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Freestyle 4 league | 30 | 180 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Fastgame | 5 | 120 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Standard | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 15 | exactly five stones |
| Renju | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 15 | renju rule |
There were technical difficulties like every year, though much fewer than last year.
- This year, both the Gomocup homepage and Gomocup live were rewritten. At the beginning of the tournament, the live was down because a bug in the new Gomocup live caused server overload.
- Due to the unstable Internet connection, there were issues with GomocupJudge, for both client-server communication, and live game uploading.
- There was a bug in GomocupJudge that resulted in incorrect statistics files (_result.txt) during freestyle 4 and 3. Since they had no influence on the results, we did not restart the tournament (the incorrect statistics were manually fixed after the tournament). We fixed the bug before the start of freestyle 2.
Rapfi, AlphaGomoku (Kozarzewski), Gofive, DeepFire, Ego, and LightBlue were the top 6 of the freestyle 4 league. All of them advanced to freestyle 3, since they were all new AIs.
Rapfi, AlphaGomoku (Kozarzewski), Gofive, DeepFire, Ego, and Djall were the top 6 of the freestyle 3 league and advanced to freestyle 2.
Like their performance in freestyle 4 and 3, Rapfi, AlphaGomoku (Kozarzewski), Gofive, and DeepFire were again the top 4 in freestyle 2 league and advanced to freestyle 1.
The freestyle 1 league this year was very competitive and exciting, not only thanks to the debut of 4 strong brand new AIs, but also thanks to big updates of AIs from the previous Gomocup. In particular, the new Embryo was a strong challenger to Yixin and the competition between them was very tense. Finally, the winner of the freestyle league was Yixin. The second place was taken by Embryo, and the third by Goro. Rapfi achieved the fourth place in its debut.
The fastgame league was as competitive as the freestyle league. While Embryo soon dominated the league and Yixin took the runner-up, Goro and Rapfi were battling for the third with very close performance. Finally, Goro lost to Rapfi in its games with Rapfi, but obtained higher Elo than Rapfi by better overall performance against the other AIs.
Embryo became the new fastgame champion, with an amazing winning rate of 97.5% (1006 win and 26 loss). The second was Yixin, and the third was Goro.
This year two more AIs, XoXo and Gofive joined the standard league. While Gofive had stable performance, XoXo crashed many times. Particularly, we observed that XoXo performed much more stable in common standard gomoku openings than the specially-designed openings for Gomocup. In addition to the crash of XoXo, we also had a problem running the new Hewer at the beginning of this league. We found that although the new Hewer could well support the standard rule with board size 20x20, it could not run with 15x15. The bug was reported to Tomas Kubes, the author of Hewer, and was soon solved.
Yixin was the winner of the standard league. The second was Renjusolver, and the third was Tito.
It was the third year for Gomocup to have the renju league. The winner of the renju league was Yixin. Whose had much better performance than last year and finally took the second place. After a small gap, the third was Renjusolver.
You can download complete results and openings here.