Recently, I have noticed the presence of a bot “9x9 Professional” in the 9x9 ladder. It is an awesome engine and I guess it will be in the top very soon. It crushes every player easily and I am afraid It will be on top as long as it wishes…
Please do not misunderstand me. I love watch bot games, they are almost perfect and I understand that for dan players they become an interesting challenge… But… I come from the chess world where engines are now omnipresent… correspondence chess is now extinct…
Maybe (or maybe not) bots should be not allow to play in ladders. Maybe (or maybe not) there should be a ladder where bots (and humans helped by bots) are allowed. I do not want to make bot developers work impossible either… This is already working on the main tournaments and the Alan Turing tournament was created for this purpose.
In summary, administrators might have some thinking about this… now that Alpha go can beat humans go will change dramatically and I do not want to see again how correspondence games dissapeared.
I don’t think 9x9 Professional is strong to the extent you claimed as “Crushing every player easily”, considering the fact that I’ve defeated it’s advanced level 2 times out of 4 games. It’s very strong, but it shouldn’t be worried that the it will “dominate” the server.
Anyways, I agree with you that bots should not be present in the 3 ladders. Maybe someone should make a bot ladder.
You are right. “Crushing every player” is not appropiate for dan players (It is for me ).
However, in its profile it is said that it won 91 games and lost 4 against strong players. It is playing at a 5 dan level.
Maybe is not winning every game easily but statistically it is very strong. On the other hand, other bot, valkirya9 is
winning the Alan Tirung tournament every year against the best players in 9x9…
Furthermore, their learning curves are much faster than ours… I have no doubt that very soon bots will be undefeatable for humans (in 9x9 at least, as they already are in chess).
They can be defeated by a team of a strong player and a strong engine, though. I don’t think using computer assistance against a bot is cheating. Still, I agree that bots should be excluded from regular ladders.
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I don’t think using computer assistance against a bot is cheating. Still, I agree that bots should be excluded from regular ladders.