Viking

    Keywords: Online Go, Software

Viking is a computer go program that is written by Magnus Persson (Zapp on KGS). Currently Viking 5 often play on KGS. Check KGSBotRatings for the current rating on 9x9, and KGSBots for more info about bots!

Viking 4

This older version of Viking uses a very complex full board evaluation function to find good moves. The evaluation function and move generation rely heavily on 1000's of handmade patterns.

14 Mar 04: Was able to connect to KGS with kgsGTP.


Viking 5

Since it was very hard to improve Viking4 I decided to try the monte carlo approach that seems very popular among new bot writers on KGS. I added some extra knowledge about eyes and simple ladders for example and it started to play quite strong. It is capable of full width search but in most cases on KGS it only gets to 1 ply in the 30 seconds it uses per move.

It now has a fuseki library for 9x9. Now and then I will take the games played against viking on KGS and add them to the library. So if you beat it, it will learn good moves from you and avoid its bad moves. Right now I have about 5000 games but most of them are from games against other bots and has a strong tendency to repeat the same moves over and over again. Currently most people play black against but it is better if the games are 50% black and 50% white. Thus the opening library will learn new things for both colors.

A 7x7 fuseki library has now been added. Right now it has about 50 games. This is expected to play really strong soon. Note that the correct komi is probably 9.5 for 7x7. This mean that playing black against Viking with the standard 7.5 komi gives you an advantage, and Viking may play inferior moves and resign early because of this. If you play white with correct or reduced komi on the other hand I think it is much more of challenge.

You might try 13x13 against Viking5 but I do not recommend it. 19x19 is impossible right now. It can barely anlyze one candidate move on 19x19 in 30 seconds...

3 Feb 05: Viking5 is tested on KGS for the first time.
2 June 05: Fuseki library for 9x9 added!
10 July 05: Second place in the Open 9x9 CG KGS Tournament. [ext] http://kgs.kiseido.com/en_US/tournEntrants.jsp?sort=s&id=104
12 July 05: Fuseki library for 7x7 added!
5 August 05: Updated fuseki libraries with new games. IMPORTANT! Some minor tactical improvements. Currently I cannot use KGS games with undo in them so if you want your games to improve viking you should not undo.
8 August 05: I decided to simplify the code and remove some old stuff. In that process I must have deleted some severe bugs, because the playing strength against Gnugo increased more than anything I did for a long time. Hint to all programmers: best way of improving the program is to delete code not to write new...
8 August 05 b: Removed a bug that made passing a coin flip. At least once this bug caused Viking to fill the board and resign in the end.
4 September 05: Split first place in the Formal Division 9x9 CG KGS Tournament. [ext] http://kgs.kiseido.com/en_US/tournEntrants.jsp?sort=s&id=118 In this tournament I was able to use a 3 Ghz P4 rather than my laptop. The long time controls also favored viking5.
5 September 05: Updated the fuseki databases with games from August.


This is a copy of the living page "Viking" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2005 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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