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The MCG challenge.

Posted By: Matt Ryder
Date: Friday, 4 December 2009, at 6:10 a.m.

In Response To: The MCG challenge. (Matt Cohn-Geier)

I will play money games against GNU, Snowie, or XG until my fingers cramp, and after that I can call out my moves.

So you're utterly indifferent to which of the silicon “Big 3” is employed, in spite of the fact that each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the playing engine of at least one these – XG – was recently enhanced? Ah, braggadocio!

We still haven’t established the full reach of this claim:

• Is this just a money-game proposal? Or are you prepared to play a series of matches against the bots? (Match-play would ensure that more games reach a point where the bot can use its bear-off database – not to mention its MET)

• Would you be prepared to play a series of 1-pointers, or do you need to lure the bot into high-value cube blunders to beat it?

• How long would the participants have to consider each play? Do you claim to beat the bots if they’re allowed the luxury of a rollout, or is it simply their n-ply lookahead you claim to conquer? What is the search-space? What are the settings? What’s the maximum spec of the hardware your opponents can employ to run the bot?

Here’s how I’d setup such a contest:

• My bot of choice would be eXtreme Gammon utilizing XGR+

• XG would run off a Core i7-965 Extreme Edition CPU.

• The winner would be declared based on the best of a series of 31 5-point matches played over several days.

• A team of impartial spectators would facilitate.

• MCG would play over an actual board, against a human ‘avatar’ who would roll for XG and play its moves.

• A separate team would operate the bot in a completely different location, using the internet to communicate moves with the humans.

That sounds like quite a lot of effort to prove a point. Why not rather simply post a position where XG would erroneously skyrocket the cube? To be convincing, it has to be a "real" position from an actual game, not a 'textbook' example artificially manufactured (such positions are often almost impossible to engineer in reality.)

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