I don’t even know anything about this specific bot, but when a bot can play well enough to reach like a high ddk rank, it must be doing something correctly.
At that stage, it shouldn’t randomly be ignoring ataris especially in the late stages of games. Unless you’re ok with the bot being very volatile. But the whole point is to question why the bots have large swings in ranking.
If you imagine there’s two ways to program a weak bot
- Your bot just is that strength naturally, you coded up a bunch of rules, tree search, whatever and it just plays at about that level, maybe stronger or weaker if it can look further or less far.
- You actually have a strong bot but you want to make it weaker, so you introduce conditions to make it lose points intentionally.
In case 1, you can maybe manually patch flaws to stop it losing to certain tricks.
If it’s case 2 and you’re wondering why your bot isn’t at a stable rank, maybe you need to adjust when it decides to intentionally play a bad move.
My feeling based on playing Amybot ddk is that it’s based on a stronger bot.
It plays quite well overall in the opening and middle game. It’s fine if it can read 5 or 6 moves ahead to capture stones, it’s supposed to be ddk.
But then it ignores random ataris in the endgame like (and it responds to ataris otherwise)
and
even though it “knows” how to live to begin with.
The reason I’m even trying moves like that, is that I suspect it is a coin flip of sorts to just ignore ataris.
I’ll try another game.