Amybot-ddk Tactics

Strategy and Tactics
1

The amybot-ddk AI usually crushes me in 9x9 even though we’re about the same kyu. Its style of play is pretty obvious: connect and hane like crazy. Very aggressive. Does anyone have tips for how to handle such tactics? Again, just for 9x9. That’s all I’ve been playing.

Thanks!

2

Mmh I played a couple of games against the bot and the only reason it’s 14k is because it’s terrible at a) life and death and b) endgame.

The opening is excellent and even most middle game moves are reasonable. It will ignore some moves it shouldn’t ignore (I misclicked once, which should probably have lost me the game but I won easily, because it didn’t take advantage of it).

Now you don’t necessarily want to exploit the bot’s predictable weaknesses so I’d suggest to practice against stronger bots that won’t let you get away with these things… and only play amybot once in a while as a kind of benchmark.

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3

You can try making 2 simultaneous l&d problems on the board, weak bot is destined to get at least one of them wrong xDD

But to be honest, i recommend you don’t play that much against bots, because they usually make a bit weird mistakes, and you might accidentally start copying those mistakes in your own gameplay.

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4

It doesn’t defend, and it doesn’t understand life and death. Just cut and capture stuff, while making sure you’re reasonably safe.

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5

I’ll rephrase the question in light of smurph’s comment: what are tactics to survive amybot’s excellent openings?

I get that bots aren’t like real world, and I’ve seen amybot mistakes that can be exploited once I survive the opening game. My view is playing a bot is useful because if you can’t defeat a bot despite the mistakes it makes then you have gaps in your play. IE - Constantly losing to a bot says more about your skills than constantly winning to a bot. So if I can’t beat amybot’s openings then I’m vulnerable to humans who use the same opening style.

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6

Play a good opening? Not really sure there’s another good way of playing against good openings other than to play the opening well, yourself. Even in the opening, though, amybot leaves major weaknesses. Direction of play is good, but the tactical mistakes are present all game.

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7

Rules of thumb (in a game with komi):

  • if anyone loses a group, it’s basically game over
  • if black is split into two groups, white is favored
  • if white lives with 2 groups, white is favored

mark5000 has created a 9x9 opening explorer you can use to get a feeling for balanced openings.

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8

Out of boredom I played a couple of even games against amybot.
What I think I roughly did:

  • two 3-3 invasions in the open corners, mostly ignoring amy’s opening
  • don’t play any opening move that touches amy’s stones
  • if amy plays a move near either of my groups, I respond by defending
  • if amy plays a move that touches my stone, I respond
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