HouseBot / News: Recent posts

This is mostly a bug fix release

ELO 0.1 is a new member of the HouseBot family. It can compute the strengths of move features when trained on game data.

This utility is standalone and requires input data that has been preprocessed by a go engine. The file format for input and output is simple (see sample included with source)

Update is mostly enhanced infrastructure in support of ELO-based move ordering and progressive widening. The next release in the 0.7 series should include enhanced functionality to take advantage of the infrastructure.

This release contains enhanced searching capability, including a few mogo-like enhancements of UCT: tuning and rapid action value estimation.

This will be the last release in the 0.6 family. Future releases will by in the 0.7 family. 0.7.x will include such features as patterns in playouts, progressive widening, and ELO ratings for moves.

Additionally, both this most recent development block and the next one are prolonged because of the holiday season.

HouseBot's internals are no longer hard coded to support go. The framework for searching can support a wide variety of board games (once someone writes the code for the game rules).

Time management has been greatly enhanced. Now supports the quirks of CGOS, KGS, and GoGUI while efficiently using the time available. Includes logic to adapt to variable time losses both inside and outside of the program.... read more

HouseBot now supports 4 search modes, including a custom algorithm "Monte Carlo Transposition Reuse" (MCTR). To use it, try --mode 1plyShuffle

Additionally, a lot of the default input parameters have been changed. Compiling HouseBot now requires use of the Tango library.

After a long release gap and lots of rewriting, HouseBot 0.6.0 is finally release3d.

HouseBot 0.6.0 features full threading support, pondering (thinking on opponent's time), and a simple gtp command registration mechanism (local functions can be registered and the gtp core will handle all type conversion of inputs and outputs as well as handling errors)

HouseBot is now written in D. This was done both as a learning experience for developers as well as an excuse to get into contract programming and unit testing (which are built into the language). Use of these features will result in a more robust long term project.