Thanx for trying my lovely abalone ;)

Good to see that i'm fast, it's true that i'm probably not that bad in terms of
search (and plenty of ideas), and still a lot of work to do on evaluation, i
know it ;) Anyway in the version you got, i'm also pruning a lot too much + the
time for pruning decision at each node is too high. i.e. without the futility
stuff i'm at about 500knodes/sec but i evaluate a lot more nodes therefore it
takes more time :) I'm working on it ;)

I'm using the evaluation described in the tele1-02_aich-abalone.pdf paper, with
manhattan/hexagonal distance, but i dont know which weight to give to
barycenter of my stones, my opponent's barycenter, the board center or the
missing stones, and i dont know how to measure the strength (i havent yet
implemented a match betwen my program and itself with different settings and i
cant get the abnet thing work either).

I still have a lot to do it seems :)

David.

Quoting Nacre <nacre_computer@...>:

>
> >[...]
> >I'm interested in getting your opinion about the strength/speed of the
> program
> >(it's my current version, not optimized for everything, lots of clock calls,
> >unoptimized new heuristic ideas i'm still working on). I'm also interested
> in
> >exchanging ideas if you write abalone programs too.
> >
> >
> Hi David.
>
> I tried a game between Nacre 2003 and My Lovely Abalone 1.4. Nacre
> clearly won.
> My Lovely Abalone - Nacre : 0-1
> To me it looked like you have spent a lot of effort on search, and much
> less on evaluation function.You probably have the most advanced Abalone
> program with respect to search, but it looked as you had a simple
> center-distance evaluation function.
>
> If I'm correct, you may be able to leap into top-2 of Abalone programs
> simply by using compactness in evaluation. See also
> http://www.igi.tugraz.at/telematik/tele1-02_aich-abalone.pdf (Werner
> calls it "Geometric Score") or
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/abalone_prog/message/2
>
> With respect to speed: It doesn't matter (yet). Nacre does 40k nodes/s
> on my computer. My Lovely Abalone 1.4 does 250k nodes/s
>
> Regards,
> Peer
>