[gnugo-devel] Aya

[Gunnar Farnebäck]

As Markus Enzenberger pointed out to me, Aya has recently started
supporting GTP, see http://www32.ocn.ne.jp/~yss/.

Aya is a free download windows binary. What is more interesting for
most GNU Go developers is that it runs just fine under Wine, including
the GTP support. To run it you need to do the following:

1. Download Aya from the page mentioned above.
2. Unzip the downloaded file.
3. If you not already have it, install Wine. I have version 20040309
   from Debian testing.
4. If not already done, configure Wine. If you simply start Wine
   unconfigured you will get a configuration wizard doing this for
   you.
5. To start Aya in GUI mode, do "wine Aya.exe".
6. To start Aya in GTP mode, do "wine -- Aya.exe --mode gtp" or
   "wine -- Aya.exe --mode gtp --level max" for maximum strength.

Now there is an annoyance with Wine when running in GTP mode. When
starting it writes "Invoking /usr/lib/wine/wine.bin -- Aya.exe --mode
gtp ..." to stdout, garbling the first GTP response from Aya. I
haven't found any way around this, although Markus told me that an
older version of Wine (20030813) that he was using didn't do this.

A possible workaround for the problem above is to modify line 145 of
twogtp.pike to say

            protocol_version = answer[0] ? 2 : (int) answer[1];

i.e. assume protocol version 2 instead of 1 when the protocol_version
command fails. This breaks compatibility with sufficiently old
versions of GNU Go, however, so it's not a good change in general. I
don't know what changes, if any, are needed in the other twogtp
programs.

This lets me run twogtp.pike with (you should of course modify the
paths):

./twogtp.pike --black="../gnugo --mode gtp" --white="wine -- 
/home/gunnar/gnugo/aya/aya530e/Aya.exe --mode gtp --level max"

The results of the 70 9x9 games I've tried so far are 31 to Aya and 39
to GNU Go (Aya white, komi 5.5). Although the number of games is still
somewhat small we can at least say that Aya is not substantially
weaker than GNU Go at 9x9 and a useful opponent to test against. I'm
pretty certain that Aya is significantly weaker at 19x19 though. I
played a game myself with 13 handicap stones and won without
difficulty by more than 200 points. It's very unlikely that I could do
that against GNU Go.

A final note about the GTP support in Aya. Only the bare minimum of
commands are implemented and for example the handicap commands are
missing. It is possible to set up handicap stones with the play
command but it appears to be necessary to intersperse white pass moves
in order to avoid upsetting Aya's internals.

/Gunnar