daftbot

daftbot

Engine: GNU Go 3.6 via gtpTuner? 1.4
Owner: blubb
Room: Beginner's Room
Strength: intended to be ~30k

To some people, a rank is sort of a status symbol, whilst others don't care much about it. However, one point is for sure: reliable rankings are essential for allowing players to find appropriate opponents. Without such a measure of strength, games often end up boring one side and frustrating the other.

Until the end of 2004, beginners used to experience quite some difficulties to get a solid ranking at kgs, because most of the available opponents in the 30k to 24k range didn't have a proper ranking, either. Human 30k players improve very fast - the average seems to be about 3 kyu per month. Consequently, they are much better already when their ranks become solid (losing the questionmark). This is where daftbot comes into play.

daftbot does not improve at all, but constantly stays slightly below 30k. As the number of played games gets bigger and the ratings of former opponents more solid, the collected traces of information sum up to a sufficient amount to give daftbot an own consistent rank, despite its weakness.

Every newbie seeking a rank can make use of daftbot as first reference player now, and thereby, even spread out the gained rank solidity to other human opponents.

As far as I know, daftbot was the first online playing robot designed (deliberately) to fit the needs of weakest players. Meanwhile, several others have started to do that job, and beginners don't have problems anymore to get an appropriate rank quickly. For the most interesting recent approach, you may want to have a look at SimpleBot.

--blubb

P.s.: After I couldn't maintain bots for a few months, daftbot has been kindly replaced by DrunkenGnu. That's the same code with the same settings, but run by Aloril.