Gomocup 2007, the 8th tournament (April the 27th, 2007)

The eighth tournament took place at The University of West Bohemia in PC lab UI 303 as the last time. There were 11 computers Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz HT, 1GB RAM in the lab. This year was very rich in new programs, Tito and Gmotor (used to be G_motor) showed off with a new version. There were four brand new programs: Jude by Wooming (China), Pecuchet by Vilem Walter (Czech Republic), demo of Onix by István Virag - Janos Wágner (Hungary) and at the last moment created NaBaMoKu from Jiri Isa (Czech Republic).

There were programs written in interpreted languages C# and Java for the first time.

There were 23 programs from 5 countries in competition. According to last year's results, every following trio was divided into three groups by lots:

  • 1.-3. (Goro, Tito, HGarden)
  • 4.-6. (Pela, swine, Kanec)
  • 7.-9. (BestMove, Noesis, QMentat)

The rest was draw from remaining programs. Finally there were three basic groups of 8,8,7 programs.

  • 1. Tito, Kanec, Qmentat, Trunka, Gmotor, Benjamin, Pisq7, Puškvorec
  • 2. HGarden, Pela, Noesis, Jude, Hewer, Onix, Leonardo, Curnpis
  • 3. BestMove, Swine, Goro, Brutefor, AI1000, NaBaMoku, Pecuchet

Openings number 1, 3 and 5 were decided by lots.

There were several technical problems at the beginning. Proceeding basic groups were aborted without reason, so I restarted the tournament to ensure everything would be ok. Unfortunately, due to high networking security, online broadcast didn't work. After that, everything worked fine. 11 full loaded multithreading computers (21 clients and server) heated up the room so much that a permanent draught wasn't enough to cool the room down.

The basic groups were finished in 45 minutes at the second attempt. It was finished so fast that I hardly caught to set up all computers. There were only three buggy programs: memory consuming old Hewer that I couldn't set up to work properly, several times Onix exceed memory limit too. And I saw Jude to make an error too. The results are in following tabs:

1st group:

2nd group:

3rd group:

The AI that got through to the final were Tito, Kanec, Gmotor and after long period Trunkat
from the first group, HGarden, Onix, Pela, Noesis from the second group and Swine, Goro,
Pecuchet and Bestmove from the last group. Swine surprised by defeating Goro and seemed to be the champion. The time limits for the finals were extended to 400 seconds for a turn and 2200 seconds for entire match.

Tito and HGarden exactly knew when to defend and when to attack, they had an ace up their sleeve. Both of programs sometimes surprised by risky and successful attack from poor looking position. New Gmotor behaved a little like hewer, let himself to be encircled. Pela, HGarden and Onix, the champions in encircling, took advantage of his weakness. Onix even managed to totally encircle and choke Goro one time. Swine showed that it could use the space and not only stick stones together like others.

I didn't catch to watch first opening, because I was busy setting up the computers, the tiros tournament and the Fast-game tournament. The second opening leant to attack-defend switching battle with building up positions. The third opening was very interesting. AIs was building attack independently with quiet watching opponent. As soon as one of them started to defend it lost the game or win in the following attack. In the one of the last and interesting games Swine defeated Pela using 6 seconds per game whereas Pela needed 21 minutes. This allowed swine to get the point and to outrun Goro.

Final results:

Unequivocal champion of tournament was new Tito that had only one draw with Goro and lost only 7
games of 64. The second was HGarden with one draw and one lost and the third was swine. In the final, Kanec made one error and Onix seven.

The most time consuming brain was Pela with 55s/move and 1290/game. The quickest brain was Trunkat (278/move) followed by swine (1600/move). The most memory consuming (except Hewers 643MB in basic group) was Onix 360MB, the least memory consuming was Tito 1.32MB.

In the end there was a fast game tournament again which was won by Tito as well. This year's novelty was tournament of new programs with 400 seconds for a turn and 2200 seconds for entire match. The best tiro was Onix.

Quick tournament:

Tiros (newbies) tournament:

You can download:

Recorded results of the tournament

Openings file for the P. Lastovicka's Piskvorky manager