[computer-go] Congratulations to LeelaBot2 and to CzechBot

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

Evan Daniel wrote:

> It is entirely within the power of the other bots to not lose on time.

I am not sure that is true.

LeelaBot should be perfectly capable of playing about 12 moves per 
second in the default configuration.

However, it seems either KGS or kgsGtp do not (correctly) account for 
connection lag, or the interface adds lag of its own. If it is indeed 
connection lag that is the problem, KGS is about 150ms from the 
tournament machine, which means Leela can't actually play more than 6 or 
7 moves per second at best, even if the engine itself would move at 
infinite speed. I think that in the actual game, the speed was closer to 
2 moves per second and this was not enough to avoid the time loss.

CGOS provides some lag compensation which removes most of the symptons 
but does not actually solve the problem. People with fast connections 
have more thinking time. If you have a connection hiccup at a bad 
moment, you can still lose on time (this happened 1 or 2 times with 
Leela in a few hundred games). But in general it is less of a problem to 
play out games completely, and in fact Leela does exactly that on CGOS.

I also really do not see what HBotSVN has done wrong. Surely the engine 
can't be at fault because it could not identify dead groups correctly 
(if that is a requirement, we will all be unable to play tournaments 
until about the time the game is solved). I also don't see what could 
possibly be the objection against playing until the game is finished. 
These rules are sensible for computer games and work fine on CGOS.

I do not like to cripple Leela ("make its time handling more 
conservative"). I would like some advice on whether other people agree 
that KGS(gtp) does not completely compensate for lag. If it does 
compensate completely, then the error must be at my side and I will 
focus on fixing whatever it is that causes the moving speed to be below 
what it should be.

If it is indeed a KGS flaw I may add a workaround to Leela as simple as 
doing time = time / 10 as soon as winrate >95% or so. There is still a 
possibility of losing on time then but it should happen less.

At the time when I was playing with my chess engine on the chess 
servers, those servers provided "timeseal" and "timestamp" programs that 
compensated for lag. It was no problem to play at timecontrols of game 
in 1 minute with such tools, without any workarounds.

PS. I sent a correction to the hardware but I see the report still has 
the old information. LeelaBot was on 1 x Intel Xeon 5355 @ 2.66Ghz, so 
"only" 4 CPUs.

-- 
GCP