At the thread in the previous post, there’s news on the latest release, which supports spectator mode and headless AI network clients. (You don’t need to do any work to run a headless AI client beyond implementing the OpenTafl engine protocol—headless AI mode runs your AI as an external engine.)
This is the new stable version, and sees the stable version catch up to v0.3.x. The v0.4.x series will primarily involve optimizations and AI algorithm improvements.
Nice progress! Sadly I have not done any work on my Tafl AI for a month 
Don’t feel too bad—somewhere along the road, I’ve completely ruined the performance of my AI. I think a bugfix I made to one of my custom data structures made it much slower.
Quick reminder: four months until entries are closed!
Eeeeeeeeek! My entry will serve the purpose of making everyone (else) a winner
The fellow who runs playtaflonline.com whipped up a bot in a day or two which is reliably better than OpenTafl, so I’ll be right there with you at the back of the pack.
Also, your AI might just end up being the kryptonite to someone else’s. Right now my AI looks like it makes smart moves, but if you just aggressively capture pieces it really starts to fall apart.
Attention, entrants: you now have 77 days to go until the deadline!
OpenTafl is playing at its highest level ever, reasonably able to defeat decent players on 7x7 boards, but the 11x11 board still proves to be a lot of trouble. I hope to spend some more time on that later this month.
How’s everyone else doing?
Sadly I am swamped by work on Vangard and have not made any progress.
Heads up: thirty days to go! Watch this space for news about logistics and scheduling. Looking forward to seeing the entrants!
About two weeks to go! Deadlines and submission guidelines are available at the tournament website.
I also took some time to spin up an Amazon EC2 instance of c3.large size, on which all the AIs will be running. Here are OpenTafl’s benchmark mode results for v0.4.4.7b:
./OpenTafl.sh --benchmark
OpenTafl v0.4.4.7b log from Sat Dec 03 02:20:31 UTC 2016 on ip-172-31-5-180
Java version: 1.8.0_111
Brandub 7: finished in 27.429 sec, searching 1133609 nodes to depth 6
Tablut 9: finished in 36.718 sec, searching 1127203 nodes to depth 5
Copenhagen 11: finished in 6.562 sec, searching 23562 nodes to depth 4
Tablut 15: finished in 11.343 sec, searching 113556 nodes to depth 4
These results are directly comparable to the results of any other benchmark run using OpenTafl v0.4.4.7b, and are a good indicator of both single-core performance and memory performance. (For comparison, my laptop, with a recent Core i7m, is about twice as fast on Brandub through Copenhagen, and about 33% faster for Tablut.) Plan accordingly!
I’ll be running the OpenTafl server on another EC2 instance in the same datacenter, to reduce the influence of latency on AI time usage planning. When tournament games are ongoing, I’ll post the server address here so people can spectate.
One week to go before the official deadline! As stated at the tournament website, I’ll probably accept late entries up until the 22nd or 23rd when tournament play will start. I will test every entry on Amazon’s hardware as soon as the entry comes in, though, so if I have trouble running it, earlier entries will have more time to get things figured out.
I’m having some trouble submitting by email – gmail blocks runnable jars in attachments. Any ideas on how to get around this?
Either a shared Google Drive or Dropbox item would be fine. If neither of those are possible, shoot me an email and I’ll set up some other submission mechanism.
Righto, done via dropbox. Let me know if you don’t get a message from dropbox (or have any issues running the AI).
Looks to be working fine. Your evaluation function is very clever. In the interests of suspense, I haven’t played it against OpenTafl yet, and I don’t think I will until I’m doing all the tournament round robin stuff, but I played a quick game against it, and even with only 10 seconds, it seems to play pretty smart.
Cool, good to hear. Right now I’m pretty sure it is hard-coded to use 10s regardless of how much time it is told it has, so it won’t get any better than that 
Today is the last day for late entries.
Long story short: the only entry to arrive functional and on-time came from our very own Jono. He graciously agreed to a one-match playoff with OpenTafl for the title, rather than taking it outright as is his right. There’s a liveblog up at soapbox.manywords.press, and if you have the OpenTafl client, you can spectate by pointing your client’s server setting to taflopen.manywords.press.