Visualisation of UCT search

Hello,

connection game guru Cameron Browne has designed

a very nice graphics that shows the results of

UCT search for Hex.

This format may be used also for many other connection

games (including Havannah), and also for go.

You find a screenshot at

http://www.althofer.de/k-best-visualisations.html

Ingo.

Very nice. One interesting challenge is to visualize k-best moves of a Connect6 game where each move consists of two pieces on the board. Any thoughts?

Hi z,

> One interesting challenge is to visualize k-best moves

> of a Connect6 game where each move consists of two

> pieces on the board. Any thoughts?

Not directly. I only know that some programmers make

the Connect-6 search in 2 steps - one for each of the

2 pieces.

Analogously, in Amazons some bots split the search in

two steps: first the move of the queen, and in step 2

her arrow.

The idea behiond these 2-step approaches is to make the

game tree less wide.

@z: One way would be to draw a line for each pair of cells, from the center of one member of the pair to the center of the other, using a color chosen to represent the value of the move, with line width thick enough to easily see the color. This would get hopelessly cluttered if trying to depict all legal moves. It's better for graphing only, say, those moves that have the highest value. Lines overlapping is not a problem, except for those that are collinear, for which I have no solution.

@MarleysGhost: Fabulous idea! I can already picture how useful it will be in most cases. One problem arises, though, when lines with the same slope overlap. A possible solution is to draw curves instead of straight line segments.

MarleysGhost wrote:

> It's better for graphing only, say, those

> moves that have the highest value.

That is in general a good approach.

My idea would be to use colours to indicate which

moves occur in pairs: similar colours for positive

correlation.

@Ingo: coloring has the same overlapping problem when two pairs share one piece.

@z: Curved lines, what a great idea! Maybe you can draw your diagram with some perspective and make them look like little arch bridges.

@z:

I was not clear in my former statement.

> coloring has the same overlapping problem when

> two pairs share one piece.

I do not want to mark or colour pairs, but only vertices.

Simple example: Assume the top three pairs are

(A,B), (A,C), (C,D)

Then one might give "central" colour orange to vertex A,

colour yellow to B,

colour red to C,

colour violet to D.

A and C would get bigger markers because they are involved

in two pairs each.

(I know that finding best colours may become difficult when many

more "top pairs" are to be visualized.)

\*\*\********************************

Another idea with 2-levels (without colors):

In level 1 each vertex gets a mark, where larger marks

stand for "more interesting" vertices. The user is allowed

to make a mouse-click on a single vertex. Then, for this

vertex all partner vertices (which occur in good pairs)

are shown.

Ingo.

Ring-of-Fire now has

graphical output,

similar to Ingo's suggestion. (It's "live" in the sense that

it only shows something while it's actually thinking about a move.)

You need a browser that handles SVG-in-HTML (e.g., Chrome from version 7)

The color of the blobs is the move value (green = good, red = bad),

and the radius is number of visits (large = many).

Colors are normalized (the best value is always pure green, no matter

how bad it actually is), and visitor counts are logarithmic.

Yes, I will make the blobs click-able (to walk the tree).

the link you gave is always 'temporarily down'.

I have Chrome 6.0.472.63, and it claims it is up-to-date (as of right now). How did you get a version 7?

sorry, r-o-f (and author) needs a time-out.

in fact the graphical output was making it very clear

that something is broken (in AMAF, I guess).

@aganju:

developer downloads, e.g. I am running "8.0.552.0 dev"

(Of course they're tagged "unstable" and I don't really know

what data they possibly try to collect behind my back but I'm using

it only for viewing R-o-F traces.)

The feature that R-o-F uses is

inline SVG in HTML5

and this is way cool.

Well, actually, it should be standard (I hate it when I cannot define things locally, cf. missing local functions in C, and so on ...)

and here's a screenshot

shot

for the people with SVG-challenged browsers.

Wow - I want to say that is a very pretty picture.

@RingOfFile: JS canvas is more widely supported and fully capable of rendering graphics like this.

I have included Johannes' solution in my online-collection

of "visualisations of game tree searches", at

http://www.althofer.de/k-best-visualisations.html

COmments (also on the collection in general) are welcome.

Ingo.

@Ingo Do you have a copy of the 2003 paper on k-best visualizations to share?

Hi z,

I just made photos of the article (ICGA Journal, 2003, pp 182-189).

You can see them at

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-182.jpg

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-183.jpg

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-184.jpg

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-185.jpg

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-186.jpg

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-187.jpg

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-188.jpg

http://www.althofer.de/icga-2003-189.jpg

The quality is not overwhelming. I just did not

want the pictures to become too large in memory.

Keep in mind during reading that this paper was written

before the Monte Carlo revolution.

Ingo.

@Ingo: Thank you for digitizing the paper!

The website on candidate visualisations is newly extended:

two nice solutions for the game of go

\* by the Fuego team (showing territory)

and

\* by Magnus Persson on behalf of Valkyria

(showing territory and frequency of visits)

http://www.althofer.de/k-best-visualisations.html

Ingo.

link to Ingo's site

Thx, Johannes.

By the way: Where can I learn how to make

Links in LG forum clickable?

Ingo.

like this:

<br/>< a href="http://althofer.de/" > Ingo's site < /a >
br>

but indeed I don't know which html tags are allowed here and which aren't.

IMG seems to work as well.

oh and I didn't write the "br >" above.

yes, this forum is missing a preview-like function.

when I asked this a while ago, the answer was that one can

write some trial text in one's player profile,

to see the formatting, and then delete.

This seems to be as good a place and time as any to ask something that's always puzzled me here: Why is it that the letters s, c, r, i, p, t when written together always get a hyphen forced inside, like "script".

I'd guess that's to avoid javascript and the security issues related to javascript.

It's to prevent malicious posters from being able to put JavaScript into the pages that others will download.