Gomocup 2024, the 25th tournament (May 17th-19th, 2024)
The Gomocup 2024 took place on May the 17th-19th, sponsored by Tech Center of Lightspeed & Quantum Studios Group, Tencent.
There were four cloud servers whose configurations were the same:
- Tencent Cloud Servers SA2.8XLARGE64 (Windows Server 2022, x64 32 vCPU (AMD EPYC 7K62, 2.6/3.3GHz), 64GB RAM)
In addition to the classical freestyle, standard, renju, caro, and fastgame tournaments, we introduced a new 15x15 freestyle tournament this year. The only difference between the 15x15 freestyle tournament and the classical freestyle tournament is the board size (i.e., the 15x15 freestyle tournament is played on a 15x15 board).
The openings for Gomocup 2024 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.
- Nguyễn Minh - Gomoku player and opening analyzer, who experienced in Gomoku swap2.
- 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 opennings, 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, and won the World Correspondence Renju Championship 2019.
Thank you all!
Same as last year, we prepared 12 openings for every rule.
- Openings for the freestyle (20x20) league:
- Openings for the freestyle (15x15) league:
- Openings for the standard league:
- Openings for the renju league:
- Openings for the caro league:
What is new?
- AlphaGomoku (Kozarzewski) 2024 - developed by Maciej Kozarzewski from Poland. Speedup from using AVX512. Added OpenCL backend. Working support for YixinBoard. Small improvements in the alpha-beta search. Also added freestyle network for 15x15 board.
- Embryo 2024 - developed by Miroslav Fontán from Czechia. Supports AVX2 instruction set. Fixed bug in move generator.
- Jax 2024 - developed by Kailong Jiang from China. Multiple rules (Freestyle, Standard, Renju, and Standard Caro), multiple board sizes, and multiple devices (CPU, CUDA, TensorRT) are supported; the MCTS and the self-play improvement loop have been optimized, and several methods from KataGo have been adopted; random balanced openings and historical Gomocup openings have been added to the self-play; the spatial position feature of patterns (e.g., Double Four) is fed into the neural network to improve the precision of policy and value predictions; depending on the rules, the neural network is trained with between 2 and 10 million games.
- Rapfi 2024 - developed by Haobin Duan from China. NNUE architecture has been updated and the engine has been tuned. Bug fixes.
- Squirrel 2024 - developed by Xiyuan Liang from China. Algorithm is improved. Some bugs of defense are fixed. Add support for standard and caro rules.
There were 2 freestyle (20x20) groups (i.e., Freestyle-20 1 and 2), 2 freestyle (15x15) groups (i.e., Freestyle-15 1 and 2), 1 fastgame group (Fastgame), 2 standard groups (i.e., Standard 1 and 2), 1 renju group (Renju), and 1 caro group (Caro) in Gomocup 2024. Elo rating system was used to evaluate AIs' strength. AIs were divided into different freestyle and standard groups according to the placement in the last tournament. In particular, the division for Freestyle-15 is based on the last freestyle standings on the 20x20 board as it is the first year we have Freestyle-15 in Gomocup. For Freestyle-20 2, Freestyle-15 2, and Standard 2, the top 4 AIs will move up to the next group (i.e., Freestyle-20 1, Freestyle-15 1, and Standard 1, respectively). 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.
Memory limit/time per move/per match were determined following Gomocup 2023:
| TOURNAMENT | TIME LIMIT PER MOVE [S] | TIME LIMIT PER MATCH [S] | MEMORY LIMIT [MB] | BOARD SIZE | RULE FOR WIN |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freestyle-20 1 league | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Freestyle-20 2 league | 30 | 180 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Freestyle-15 1 league | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 15 | five or more stones |
| Freestyle-15 2 league | 30 | 180 | 350 | 15 | five or more stones |
| Fastgame | 5 | 120 | 350 | 20 | five or more stones |
| Standard 1 league | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 15 | exactly five stones |
| Standard 2 league | 30 | 180 | 350 | 15 | exactly five stones |
| Renju | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 15 | renju rule |
| Caro | 300 | 1000 | 350 | 15 | standard caro rule |
In addition, we had an unlimited tournament, where AIs were running on participants' computers. The unlimited tournament had no limitation on AI size and allowed participants to use any hardware (e.g., GPUs) that they had access to. Time per match was 120 min. There was no additional time limitation per move. Following Gomoku World Championships, the rule for this tournament was Swap2. The tournament was a double round-robin tournament and tie-break criteria were: game points; match points; Berger coefficient; personal score, following World Correspondence Gomoku Championships.
There were technical difficulties like every year.
- We had difficulty connecting the tournament participants reliably at the beginning. We resolved the issue by updating the tournament client with more robust logic.
HEWER, DEEPFIRE, TITO, and WHOSE were the top 4 in the freestyle (20x20) 2 league and advanced to freestyle (20x20) 1.
The 2024 version of RAPFI retained championship title in the freestyle (20x20) league this year. Same as last year, BARBAKAN took the second position, and the updated ALPHAGOMOKU (Kozarzewski) was the third. The updated JAX moved from 12th place last year to 5th place this year.
We introduced freestyle on a 15x15 board this year because it is a more common board size for Gomoku. This change will make the AIs in Gomocup more directly useful. WHOSE, TITO, DEEPFIRE, and ARBILLO were the top 4 in the freestyle (15x15) 2 league and advanced to freestyle (15x15) 1.
The winner of the freestyle (15x15) league was RAPFI. The second place was taken by JAX, and the third by ALPHAGOMOKU (Kozarzewski).
The winner of the fastgame league was RAPFI. It is amazing that it lost only 4 games this year, outperforming its record of 6 losses last year. The second place was taken by ALPHAGOMOKU (Kozarzewski), and the third by BARBAKAN.
RAPFI, JAX, TITO, and HEWER were the top 4 in the standard 2 league and advanced to standard 1.
RAPFI became the winner of the standard league, with only 1 loss. The second place was taken by JAX, and the third by KATAGOMO.
Like the amazing performance in the other leagues, the winner of the renju league was RAPFI again. KATAGOMO took the second place. The third was JAX.
The caro league has expanded to six AIs this year. The winner of this league was ALPHAGOMOKU (Kozarzewski). EMBRYO took the second place. The third was JAX.
This year, JAX and ALPHAGOMOKU (Kozarzewski) signed up for the unlimited league. Their match ended in two draws.
You can download complete results and openings here.