Gomocup 2020 Announcement

Published by Kai Sun at Feb 11, 2020

Hello, all Gomocup fans!

Spring 2020 is coming, and we would like to inform you about some details. Gomocup 2020 will take place from April 24th to April 26th, 2020. This year we will have two deadlines: (1) The submission deadline is on April 17th, 2020, at 11:59 pm UTC. We will examine your submission on the tournament computers and let you know if we notice any issues with it (e.g., crash) by 11:59 pm April 19th UTC. (2) The revision deadline is on April 23rd, 2020, at 11:59 pm UTC. You are allowed to revise your submission before this deadline, but due to time constraints, revisions submitted after the submission deadline may NOT receive an examination.

The compatibility requirement of Gomocup 2020 will be the same as that of 2019. If you are new to Gomocup, we strongly recommend reading compatibility details.

Following the traditional settings of Gomocup, we will have freestyle, standard, renju, and fastgame tournaments in Gomocup 2020. One author is not allowed to submit more than one AI for one rule but is allowed to submit different AIs for different rules. The memory limit is determined to 350MB, and the AI size limitation is 8MB. Time per move/per match will be 5s/120s for fastgame, 300s/1000s for final leagues, and 30s/180s for the rest. For details, you can refer to detail information. Gomocup 2020 will run on CPUs that support up to at least the following instruction sets: SSE4.1, SSE4.2, and POPCNT.

In addition to traditional tournaments above, we plan to introduce a brand new experimental tournament to Gomocup 2020, where AIs will be running on participants' computers. This experimental tournament has no limitation on AI size and allows participants to use any hardware (e.g., GPUs) that they have access to. Following Gomoku World Championships, the rule for this tournament is Swap2. No human intervention is allowed, and to enforce that, besides submitting the AI program, every participant in this tournament is also required to submit to Gomocup a detailed document on how to set up the environment and run the AI, so that we can, theoretically, check if games played in this tournament are reproducible. If you are interested in participating in this new experimental tournament, please send us an email ([email protected]) at your earliest convenience. Depending on the number of potential participants, we will have more detailed rules (e.g., time, protocol) settled tentatively by April 1st.

We require every participant to make submissions via the Gomocup user site and sign a copyright statement (link). If you encounter any problems or bugs while using the system, feel free to send an email to us ([email protected]).