I've been playing around with this "Google AI Challenge" a bit, lately: http://ai-contest.com/

It's kind of fun, in case anybody else is interested.

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be immersed

I am not interested in anything from Google and have not been for a long time. They track everything you do. I heard yesterday, from a reiable source, that they have recently contracted with the CIA to work on a repository of information about everyone because they have more information about you than the government.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

^ That wasn't needed. This is a CS thread to discuss an AI project, not a thread to bring up Google politics.

In that case, you can call it the "University of Waterloo AI Challenge"...

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be immersed

I just submitted an entry and am now waiting for it to be ranked!
For now I just used some very simple rules, so it can beat the example bots. Depending on how much time I have, I might or might not improve it

As if I had spare time, I started writing a bot for this, too, let's hope they start accepting entries written in go... I wrote a starter package and everything for them... http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=883

EDIT: what are you guys' bots called?

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

So does nearly every other website, service, & ISP. If you're really concerned about that then I'd advise staying away from anything electronic and changing your nickname to DrTinfoil.

My bot's performing better than I expected:
Rank 859 at the moment with 15 won 6 lost.
I'm registered with the name Zwejahjfa there.

That is why the only search engine I will use is startpage. They do not keep a record of your searches

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

This weekend I also made an account. I'm freegame on there as well (my account)
I Had a couple of tries. The latest one I made has these stats.

rank: 1210

I'm quite happy with that, considering I'm a mechanical engineer and not a software engineer.

@Zwergesel do you know how I can find your profile (or search for any other profile for that matter)?

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

I'm still waiting for them to get golang working on the official server, but on the test tcp server I'm now hovering around 100 Elo: http://72.44.46.68/getratings (search for "pwwax"). Looking at the other bots on that server I'm guessing that'd be somewhere between place 100 and 500 on the offical server...

Games: http://72.44.46.68/getplayer?player=pwwax.7

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Golang is finally enabled ^^

I'm in the 220's atm: http://ai-contest.com/profile.php?user_id=10821

EDIT: Kirby and Zwergesel, you should link to your profiles...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Hmm, I did not realize this was being hosted by the University of Waterloo Computer Science club (I am attending UW right now). I don't know if I'll actually join in on this, but I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

I'm currently at 440, with an extremely simple and actually quite stupid bot:
http://ai-contest.com/profile.php?user_id=11208

But I haven't updated it in a while. I hope I find some time to implement a few more ideas before the deadline.

By the way, I refuse to just hard-code a sophisticated strategy. I want to see how far I can get using generic AI techniques only

This looks cool. My bot is at rank 602 so far. It seems fairly simple to get here, but I think the competition is steeper further up the ladder.

Wow, there's a lot of us... should we get them to add L19 as an organization?

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

And somehow, I was able to create an account under the name "Marcus" ...

http://ai-contest.com/profile.php?user_id=12694

I haven't done anything yet. Let's see what this is actually all about ...

last weekend I spend an evening to make a new one. It's ranked at 622 (ELO 2325) I was hoping to get in the top 500. I guess I need to do a final update before the contest ends (this weekend)

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

Did somebody write a bot which uses a variant of MCTS? It should be possible to adapt it to this game pretty well.

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Sanity is for the weak.

@Li Kao
I don't think that works well because you need to calculate a lot of future states of the game for MCTS. You are only allowed 1 sec computation time per move. MCTS need time to perform well.

very short overview of my bot:
My program has a formula for finding the weakest planet and one for finding the strongest planet I own.
It also detects incoming enemy fleets and defends against them by sending available ships from other nearby planets.
Then it calculates the remaining ships and checks if that is enough to take over an enemy or neutral planet, if it is it sends ships from the strong to the weak planet.
besides that is directs new forces to the battlefront (shortening trip times when the ships are in demand for attack and defense)
finally it tries to "snipe" opponents planets if the opponent leaves it's planets too weak.

I also have the programming structure in place to change the strategy based on whether the program is ahead or behind in both nr of ships and growth rate.
at the moment the all section contain the same code though so even though it does detect if its ahead or behind it does not change it's strategy.

It is quite buggy though. it does not check enough things. for example it does not look to see if the enemy is sending forces to defend against an attack of my bot. It also does not use path finding to shorten trip times when tunneling ships to the front. one of the main flaws id that it does not check the result of the defense, so it starts to attack while the neighboring planet needs more help.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.