Probably right. I wondered about the playing strength more in terms of the software possibly teaching odd habits. A 10-kyu-AI would beat me without effort, but if I tried learning from that, it probably wouldn't be as worthwhile as when a 1d-AI did it to me.

2-3 kyu should be more than enough though.

Anyone know about the tablet support?

I agree with this. The bot plays very well on the iPad. I'm about 14-kyu and find the computer pretty tough to beat even on level 5 (with standard komi, no handicap). I prefer to play human opponents whether in person or online, but Crazy Stone plays very well when I don't have those options, or just want to play a bot opponent.

In particular, the AI seems to do particularly well in close combat. There have been many times that I've had fairly large three-space territory from the side, only to have the computer come in and make two eyes, despite my best efforts to stop it. It also seems to have a pretty good sense of overall strategy, knowing when to tenuki, for example, and how to balance influence vs. territory.

Of course, it does occasionally play poor moves, but that seems to make it more realistic. I actually wonder if this is done on purpose with some programs.

I played against the Crazy Stone program many times before playing online, and have actually learned a lot from it. Many people will argue that playing against human opponents is better practice, and while I agree with that, I think that you can still learn from a strong computer opponent, and Crazy Stone seems to have a reputation as one of the best AI go programs available.

Oh, that's different. Any bot will eventually teach you bad habits if you play too much with it. Just treat it as a sparring, and play real people for the real fight

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I played Crazystone last night using level one. I beat it easily. But then I tried level two. OMG. Level two must be unbeatable because it literally took my breath away. No matter what I did in level two I was being killed mercilessly. Now the strange thing is...when I skipped to level seven I was able to breathe and play more to my style. Can anybody explain this? And if anyone who can beat level two consistently is clearly a Dan level player regardless of actual rating. That's my opinion.

A couple of ideas.

First of all, I suspect that when running on a machine as weak as an ipad Crazy Stone might not be even 1 dan at its highest level. Rémi could probably tell us. Remember, an ipod is more than an order of magnitude weaker than the machine on which the KGS Crazy Stone bot runs on. Heck, the most powerful machine I have here is an order of magnitude weaker.

But the observation you report, that level one was weak, level two very strong, and level seven weaker than that (weaker than level two)? Long experience in the cypher mines has taught me that whenever what you observe is "impossible" then (at least) one of the things you think true isn't. This could be a bug (the level two setting is actually giving you something else) but in that case the problem would likely have been already reported. Far more likely something silly like although you think you set it for level two actually got bumped to level ten (or whatever) and you didn't notice.

iPad 1, beat level 2 giving 5 stones with relative ease. A friend recommended me playing bot games giving high handicaps to improve my reading and attacking, so I'm doing that (an iPad works well for it)

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Crazystone on the iPad (I have the new Ipad 3) is the only go playing software that i'm aware of that allows multiple undo. There are probably others that I'm not aware of at the moment because i haven't had much experience with many of the other popular brands out there. I just tried it out in Crazystone and it works fantastic. The only thing I wish Crazystone HD had was variation trees so I can easily go to any variation and try new lines. I also wish I could see the screen in landscape. It only allows portrait mode. I hope there's an update in the future that allows this.

In the meantime I email myself the games so I can import them into another Go program I have on the iPad and then create variation trees manually.

In 9x9 I've seen Crazy Stone beat an EGF 3d a couple of times. In 19x19 I've seen an EGF 2k crush it. (Highest Level setting for both obviously) Small samples obviously but from it's what I've seen from letting friends play it on my iPad 3.


That said, I've seen another beginner struggle a lot with level 2 even after beating level 1 consistently, it seems to be a substantial increase in strength at beginner level.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. When I said perhaps not even 1 dan on such (skimpy) hardware I meant 19x19. The MCTS progams are very strong at 9x9 because playouts take less time (games much shorter) and the sample size is a much larger percentage, though still a small percentage, of all possible moves.

Does anyone know if you can change the background color of the goban in Crazystone? I personally find the color too bright.

Yeah I figured you meant 19x19 which is why I mentioned the EGF 2k beating it easily.

When running on an ipad. We have to be careful when talking about how strong these programs are to always specify "when running on what". I don't have Crazy Stones here but if I did and ran it on a moderately powerful laptop would expect perhaps 2 dan (KGS).

Oh I'm very well aware that we're talking about just an iPad here and it's limited memory especially. I'm deeply curious what the program would be like on this machine, i5 quad core, 8GB Memory etc. Though it'd be nicer with 16GB memory from my understanding with a 3GHz quad core processor? i.e. that the memory would be the bottleneck with MCTS programs above a certain processor speed.

Hi,

Congrats for your win. The level of Crazy Stone may look a bit inconsistent sometimes, because there are some things that are obvious to humans but it does not understand.

If you wish to get the sgf of a game you saved, the app offers the option to email it to you. (Menu/Game Record/Export game via e-mail). So if the game is already saved, then first load it, then email it. The file is saved on disk, but it is a part of the disk that other apps cannot access.

Rémi

I am running Crazy Stone on my Asus Transformer Prime tablet. It works, and can even use the 4 cores. But the graphics are rather low resolution, and it runs only in portrait mode, which is a bit annoying.

Rémi

I spent a lot of time optimizing Crazy Stone's memory usage for cell phones, so it is very efficient in this area. The cell phone version uses 20-25 Mb of RAM at most. The PC version probably won't ever use more than 1Gb, even after a long analysis.

Rémi

Thanks for the reply!


Any chance of an Android HD version coming?

And what would you estimate the playing strength to be on the Transformer Prime?

Unbalance is doing the UI. I don't know much about their plans and don't want to speak for them.

Regarding playing strength, I have no precise data to give a serious estimate. At some point I tried to get rated accounts on KGS to test, but I did not manage to get my accounts rated. I may try again later.

In terms of speed, Crazy stone does about 250 playouts / second / core on the transformer prime, so 1000 playouts / second on 4 cores. This compares to about 2000 playouts / second /core on a PC. Except for speed, the program is otherwise identical.

Rémi

Does the new version still support GTP? If yes, the Unbalance GUI could be replaced by a better GUI...

Interesting! Thank you very much!

One last question, going a bit beyond Crazy Stone as it is: Do you think there'd be a worthwhile way to use distributed computing similar to SETI@home for Go AI? Of course I'd assume that to be way less efficient than a tightly integrated cluster, but perhaps the sheer scale could offset that. I'm sure there'd be a few thousand Go and AI enthusiasts around to offer their processing power.