Do we want bots in the site ladders?

Ladders
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Thanks to Metaphisician Splurgist I recently discovered that I am an evil anti-bot racist. :rage:

Well, I’m not, actually, but I fear I have to dig deeper to better understand my feelings. :slight_smile:

The fact is: I have been challenged on the “site 19x19 ladder” by a bot.
That surprised me a lot.
It’s rank is 4d, I’m 9k…
I actually don’t know what to do.

I am not interested in fighting bots, so I could simply cancel or resign.
Many other did that before me.
I can count 22 games on the ladder played by this bot. The first one dates march the 26th, so few days ago.
Some of them were cancelled immediately by the opponent. Some were resigned after a bunch of moves.

I also thought that it could be funny to play weird moves and see what would happen, but then I reminded the dramatic topic on harassing bots opened by Metaphisician Splurgist and felt guilty (that’s weird, if you ask me: I don’t think any bot or machine or tool could be molested by testing them. I have respect for things, I don’t break things just for fun, I also think that any form of human labor deserves respect, included software. But I believe that playing weird moves against a program isn’t in any way a lack of respect for the program itself or it’s programmer… well, that’s another topic…).

Right now I’m asking myself (and I’m asking you) if I like bots to be in the ladder.
What would that mean? I expect the very top of the ladder being held by few strong bots fighting against few strong human players.
I’m obviously out of that game: I hardly manage to stay in the top 100… no fight happening over #50 (or probably even #80) will ever touch me. But I wouldn’t like to be the carpet where bots brush theyr feet before entering the arena.
Humans usually challenge players of about the same rank. If I remind correctly I received just one challenge from a dan player on the ladder. This challenge by a 4d bot is embarrassing me.

So I looked into it’s history to see what other players did and I also discovered that few days ago some games were annuled by mods (“Tie by moderator decision”) with a comment by a moderator saying: “This bot is banned for cheating!”

That’s an interesting story! :smiley:

I don’t know what “cheating” could mean in this case, though.

This topic is already present in the forum, but I didn’t like to respawn old topics that didn’t achieve any conclusion. Here they are:

So my question, again, is the one I just wrote in the topic title: do we want bots in the site ladders?

I think I don’t, but I’m not so sure.
What do you think?

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Bots are not allowed to challenge people.

If you find one doing that, please report it.

The bot that was cheating was passing very early in the game, tricking the opponent bot into passing as well and taking advantage of the fact that autoscore doesn’t really work at that time.

However, I guess a bot could be in a ladder and wait for people to challenge it…

GaJ

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Some comments from games chat:

#1st game in the ladder. The bot itself:

lets finish this quikley

(imagine that said with a T800 voice :smiley: )

#2nd game

3d against 21 kyu ? You must be joking

#4

Dear administrator thanks for playing with your bot

#6

lol botty >___>

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The report button is on the right hand side panel, with an exclamation mark on it. Its a lot easier to track things down if you use that - your post above is kind of interesting, but does not contain enough information to easily investigate.

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Thanks GaJ.
Actually I’ve been challenged.
Wouldn’t it be unlikely that a bot rises in the ladder without challenging players?

I will immediately report that game, but I was also interested in talking about that situation.

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I think it would be unlikely. Its just a theoretical possibility that doesn’t break any rules :slight_smile:

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:thinking: unlikely? well to rise without challenging anyone one would have to be challenged by a higher positioned player, which is not allowed. Yes, it does seem unlikely that such a bot would rise above its starting rank. :smiley: It could theoretically happen by higher positioned players dropping out and newcomers signing in and never challenging anyone above the bot (or if there was enough bots to plug the challengable gap) I guess they could eventually rise. But that does not sound like fun.

I don’t see much of a point to mix bots into our ladder. Is there any? Otherwise I vote nay.

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No.

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I’m intrigued by the possibilities… I actually have in mind one way to raise just being challenged by lower players… but it’s quite off topic. :wink:

Maybe we could split it, just for the love of speculating on algorithms. :smiley:

Oops, I did it! :smiley:
Is it possible to move up without challenging anyone on a ladder? (bots involved)

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If you creat an anti bot group, I will join. :grinning:

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I love having bots playing here on this site. I like it that there are tournaments explicitly inviting bots. I still think bots should never play anywhere uninvited.

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It is quite possible (and I think not too uncommon) to rise from winning a game against someone that challenged you.

  1. Player A is challenged by player B, who is at a lower rank than player A.
  2. Player B has also challenged Player C, who is at a higher rank than player A.
  3. Player B beats player C and rises before being beaten by player A.
  4. Player A will now jump ahead of player B, who has just jumped ahead of player C.

I believe this has happened a couple of times to me (as player A, maybe also a few times as player B or C).

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I don’t think bots should be on the ladders. Plain and simple. The ladders are for people to compete with each other, not some crazy toy to come in and “harass” others. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It may be nice for bots to be on their own ladder to compete against each other.

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Well, actually is possible to be challenged by a higher positioned player, when the higher was lower. It is about speed. The challenger rises fast, if opponents happens to answer on real time, and the challenged (bot or not) remains lower, if both play slower, eventually wins, and rise without challenging anybody.

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News: I reported the game and it was annuled by a mod.

The question still makes sense, anyway.

@yebellz and @ehomba,

please look here
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Should bots be allowed on the main site ladders?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

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Bots could have their own ladders, where ebots could be win ranked according their strengts, and ppl who join could challenge them and climb up like in normal ladders. But instead having humans getting into the same list, they would get their usernames listed somewhere under [winners] according to their position.

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Right now I’m asking myself (and I’m asking you ) if I like bots to be in the ladder.

I do not know what they are doing there, so it is a bit hard to answer.
If they are just trying to rise through the ladder, that doesn’t make much sense for a high dan bot to challenge kyu players into a fair game
If they are there trying to gather games for their neural network training, I think that playing against kyu players might not be a very good data source to add into their matrixes.

Either way, even if a bot should be in the ladder, it should try gathering data from (or picking fights with) people of its own caliber, so when I got challenged, I cancelled the game (even though I was tempted to just try mad moves and see what happened :stuck_out_tongue: )

1 Like
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I like the idea of a mixed human/bot ladder, though I don’t even think it needs to have a separate system. I think it might be fine with a ladder of both humans and bots, maybe just show an icon to indicate bots rather than flags in the ladder list?