WeiqiDMC

WeiqiDMC stands for Weiqi Distributed Monte Carlo, just a fancy temporary name because naming it GoSomething would have made matters confusing, wouldn’t it?

As it stands, the project is just a pet-project made to test out the hypothesis that performance losses in Elixir (compared to C/C++, especially when it comes to memory management) can be offseted by the ease of writing distributed applications.

Main features

Supported GTP (Go Text Protocol) commands:

`[:version, :name, :protocol_version, :list_commands, :quit,

             :known_command, :boardsize, :clear_board, :komi, :fixed_handicap,
             :play, :genmove, :showboard, :set_game]`

Current engine is a Random Player. It has no other purpose than test out the rest of the framework.

Installation & running

Installation

For profiling, you’ll need to run mix deps.get, there are no other dependencies ATM.

With GTP front-end

Many GTP front-end seem particularity finicky with the path to the binary, so I ended-up just writing a simple bash script (chmod +x) and use the path to that script:

#!/bin/bash
cd FULL_PATH/TO/PROJECT && MIX_ENV=prod FULL_PATH/TO/MIX/BINARY run -e "WeiqiDMC.start_gtp_server"`

I used Quarry to test it out. Don’t forget to run MIX_ENV=prod mix compile first :)

The tests

Same as normal, just mix test

Roadmap

• Implement MC + RAVE
  • Copy the imperative algorithm from Sylvain Gelly’s 2011 paper (MCTS and RAVE Estimation in Computer Go) with Qeven heuristic
  • Write tests to secure the implementation (WIP)
  • Tune it to get a basic level of strength on 9x9, say 5-10k, with fixed time settings
  • Write one of the better heuristic proposed by Sylvain
  • Tune it to get it to an intermediate level of strength on 9x9, 2k-1d
• Make it distributed by spawing Erlang processes to perform multiple simulation in parallel, then regroup to calculate the new Q, Qtilde, N and Ntilde
• Add time management
• Add pondering
• Devise a protocol for testing vs other engines
• Tune the engine
• Glory
• Resign from the project and start a fork to make things right

Contributing

Please do!