Hi,

I appreciate the recent upgrade to GPUX. However, I've notice two issues. First, the "Analyze full game" option takes much longer than before. Is there a way to speed that up while still using the load balancer? Second, the "Analyze this" option updates the display so quickly that my iPad cannot keep up. At such times, I am unable to place a new stone on the board to test a variation. I must turn off the analyzer, place the stone, and then turn back on the analyzer. Perhaps you could reduce the frequency of display updates for mobile devices while still keeping the same rate of GPUX calculations?

Thanks,

Marc

Dear msarrel,
Thank you for your feedback.
Some changes were made to address these issues.

First of all, ZBaduk now has the ability to setup a polling rate.
Even though, for now, this polling rate will only be used in "analyze this" mode.



But for the "Analyze full game" mode also things are heavily changed.
The internal communication has been improved here, making scans faster.

And we also added a kind of caching mechanism for our server to store results for popular positions.
(and this will be further fine-tuned in the near future)
But already now, you will notice that for the first few moves of your games,
there will be high amount of visits, without spending any time on them.


PS: about servers:
At times you may see a gpux and a gpux2.
Why ? --> because it allows us to install and test small changes,
without disconnecting everybody.

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Thank you!

3 new features for ZBaduk (installed earlier this week).

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Lately, a lot of effort has gone in better caching mechanisms.
For the first moves of the game this saves a lot of time.

The server will memorize only positions of the first 40 moves of the game, and only for moves that have more than 1000 playouts.
It will store them in all 8 symmetries (which is very useful for hoshi openings).

Because some positions have been studied for a long time, ZBaduk has sometimes statistics for more than 100 different moves.
And it can be a bit overwhelming. For that reason, ZBaduk now has a new UI settings, which allows hiding some of these moves.
(Top 32 turns out to be perfect for the first position of the game).



Secondly, ZBaduk has added a new chart to visualize the number of playouts. Most oftenly this chart does not add much value and it will be hidden by default. But you can show/hide it using a new toolbar whenever you need it. It's especially useful, in the first minutes of a review, when the server is generating the winrate chart, because it gives a good indication of its progress.



Have fun !
And let me know what you think.

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Enjoy LeeLaZero and KataGo from your webbrowser, without installing anything !
https://www.zbaduk.com

Quick test with my raspberry pi worked reasonably well. I will recommend your website to my friends without dedicated graphics card.

Rookie question - when we're in review mode, are the read-outs we let it do stored on the server and added to its database?

Yes they are, but you have to press the save button.

_Please note: When you quit your review, it will warn you if there are unsaved changes. (e.g. moves added)
However, one point of attention: you will not be warned about unsaved playout progress.
Right now, there is no warning, but ... perhaps something to be added in the future_

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Enjoy LeeLaZero and KataGo from your webbrowser, without installing anything !
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I've really been enjoying ZBaduk and will become a paying customer on my next paycheck. One minor remark: the "sequence" displayed in the right-most chart column assumes that the vertical coordinates are arranged in ascending order, even if descending is selected in the UI settings. This is especially strange since the "move" in the left-most chart column assumes that vertical coordinates are arranged in descending order (as is customary), although this column does adapt to the chosen UI settings.

A much bigger issue I keep encountering is that in some situations, ZBaduk will stop playouts for certain moves and cannot be prodded to add further playouts. This happens under various circumstances, for example when focused position analysis is running and a past move in the tree is accidentally clicked. Once you return to the current move that you had been analyzing, ZBaduk will add no more playouts to the best moves (with some rare exceptions). It will (usually) run some slow playouts on moves that previously had a low amount of playouts (less than 1k I think).

If the "frozen" moves in question previously had a very high amount of playouts (say 100k), even deleting the game and returning to the position from scratch (and even if it is reached through a completely different move order) will not prompt ZBaduk into adding any further playouts to those moves (unless you switch to the other server, of course, but the issue persists if you switch back to the original server).

An example position that is almost completely stuck (particularly KataGo's moves) can be found at 1. R4* - 2. C3 - 3. D17 - 4. R16 - 5. Q17 - 6. R17 - 7. Q3 - 8. D15 - 9. C15 - 10. C14 - 11. C16 - 12. D14.

* ascending vertical coordinates if that matters

Are you sure that this is correct ?
That's a strange sequence, because it contains R4 twice.
Perhaps I am missing something.

Actually, it should be impossible to paste a sequence which contains the same move twice.
So, if this really happened, I should double-check the validation logice for the paste action.
(I will look into this ASAP).

(But it would make sense that KataGo refuses to calculate statistics for it, if the path is invalid/impossible.)

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Lol my bad - 7. should be Q3.

The position is still completely stuck, as is the current one at move 27 in this game: https://zbaduk.com/smartreview/GM-1977130960644-4698

The issue occurs on different devices and with different causes. Losing connection to the server will cause it (even after reconnecting). Even messing around with "show ownership" can completely freeze playouts. Will these problems resolve with the purchase of a membership?

EDIT: The playout freeze even happens across both servers (for moves with >1k playouts).

In the now-current position, at move 33, LeelaZero's top move and all of KataGo's moves are also frozen (meaning all >1k moves).

I just installed a new version that fixes this specific problem. It also adds some more color to the sequence notations.
(Personally I don't often use it, I prefer to just click the statistics, which shows a numbered preview on top of the board.)

The other mentioned issue is under investigation. Sorry for the inconveniences.
(I am not sure if a payed membership would make any difference for this exact issue.
But I can put you on a full-featured trial for a couple of days, if you like to test it.
Please send your account info to me in a private message, and I'll activate it for you).

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Enjoy LeeLaZero and KataGo from your webbrowser, without installing anything !
https://www.zbaduk.com

Here follow some screenshots of the new features.

1) The feature that most people will be interested in: charts for score predictions of KataGo.
Because it uses KataGo, the charts/button will only appear if you connect to a GPU server which offers KataGo.

There are also some slight cosmetic improvements to the button bar to show/hide charts,
I personally found the previous release not that intuitive in this regard.

2) Secondly, as mentioned in my previous message, it now has background colors for the sequence coordinates (in the table).
It just makes it easier to read them. (dark background = black's move ; white background = white's move).

3) There has also been a slight fix for the performance of some tables. They should be a bit more responsive.



4) For the "new game" button there is a little warning pop-up added. (nothing fancy).



5) And becausee several people told me that if you play vs the bot, sometimes it freezes.
In this release there is a pop-up which appears when there are connectivity issues.
(If anything it should at least add some transparency about the status)
It should automatically try to reconnect a couple of times.
But there is also a "connect now" button, just in case.

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Enjoy LeeLaZero and KataGo from your webbrowser, without installing anything !
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A seemingly connected issue is that the playouts do not just get stuck, they are also disregarded for the next move. In this game, I had KataGo analyze move 33 for about a million playouts. After playing its suggested move, its analysis of move 34 started off with about 200,000 playouts right away, based on the sequences it read out during its analysis of move 33. After move 34, I had to stop analyzing for the day. When I returned to the game and played KataGo's suggestion at move 35, it started its analysis from scratch at 0 playouts. This seems regrettable to me.

If it is possible to fix these issues, I will purchase a one-year sponsorship right away.

That is correct, and it is also a known limitation of all popular go engines right now. Bots use internal memory to store their calculation progress. If you move up/down the game tree Leela Zero and KataGo will still remember their progress for previous calculations and will be able to resume new calculations from where they left off earlier. But unfortunately:
- If you restart a bot, all progress is gone. And you have to restart calculations from scratch next time.
- After a long time of calculation, the limit of the memory can be reached. When that happens, it will start clean parts of its memory.
- The memory cannot be dumped/exported to a file right now.

ZBaduk's limitations are roughly the same. It has a pool of running leela zero and katago applications. And if you connect, it assigns a couple of those instances to your session (one per bot). So, each session gets its own instances (each with their own memory). In general, those instances are yours until you disconnect. Consequently, your progress will be gone after a reconnect. Of course ZBaduk does store statistics in your game record, which can be saved to the ZBaduk server. But those results cannot be resumed, as there is just no way to communicate this information to Leela Zero / KataGo.

Even though there have been experiments to load/save memory to files, and it hasn't been supported by leela zero and katago yet. So, right now, I think it is better to just wait and do nothing about this.

While ZBaduk cannot provide a solution. It does use a cache to store the results for the first 40 moves. This cache instantly offers millions of playouts without having to calculate anything.
But still, if you want to supersede those results, the only way, is to give the server time to calculate everything again, starting from 0. But at least it means that you do not have to calculate the first 40 moves again for each and every game.


Anyway, like most tools, ZBaduk will only replace results if the amount of playouts increases. So, if you let ZBaduk re-analyse a position, you won't see much changes at first. You will only start seeing changes once the existing statistics are superseded in playouts. (And because ZBaduk's cache only stores statistics for moves with >1k playouts, moves with <1k playouts will indirectly give away that the system is in fact calculating.)

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Enjoy LeeLaZero and KataGo from your webbrowser, without installing anything !
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Fascinating. Thank you for the behind-the-scenes insight! And also for the full-featured trial, enjoying it a lot

Just updated our website to the latest version of Angular.
Everything should render just a little bit faster now.

And secondly, the connection wizard is improved.
It allows users to select the engine (Leela vs KataGo) they want to use.
(and in the future I will add komi and handicap settings here as well).



And because, Leela Zero and Kata Go deserve a hyperlink to their github pages,
ZBaduk now has an about page as well.

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Enjoy LeeLaZero and KataGo from your webbrowser, without installing anything !
https://www.zbaduk.com