othello-zero

About

othello-zero is an implementation of the AlphaGo Zero and the AlphaZero algorithm for othello playing. The main idea comes from these papers by DeepMind:

• Core algorithm: Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge
• Details of implementation: Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm

I also referred some great posts:

• Monte Carlo Tree Search: A Deep Dive into Monte Carlo Tree Search
• Bit Board: リバーシプログラム - bitboard による合法手生成

Thanks

icodeface: Resolved a issue of compiling Edax, and sponsor this project generously.

Environment

• python 3.5 64-bit
• tensorflow or tensorflow-gpu 1.11

Usage

You can use -h option for more help.

python othello.py -h

Learning loop

A learning loop comes in two parts: self_play and train. self_play generates newest games by using the latest neural network model. train generates the next generation of model by solely learning newest games.

python othello.py --learning-loop

I'm using a sigle PC packing a 1080Ti GPU, a 4-Core i7 CPU and 32G memory to run this project. Here are my config in config.py:

# learning config
self_play_wokers_num = 8
self_play_woker_gpu_memory_fraction = 0.04
self_play_batch_size = 128
self_play_echo_max = 2
train_batch_size = 128
train_echo_max = 50
learning_loop_echo_max = 6

On my computer, two self_play echos cost about a hours to generate 2048(2×8×128) games. These wokers occupy ~17.6G(8×2.2G) memory. Then train costs ~12 minutes to take ~50K steps. Whole loop costs about 72 minutes to produce new version of othello-zero.

Play with Edax

Edax is one of the strongest othello programs in the world, written by abulmo. It was trained with about 800K games, both various in the opening and of high quality in the endgame.

Paweł Liskowski wrote a paper called Learning to Play Othello with Deep Neural Networks. He trained several CNN architectures to challenge Edax. This is a good reference on how powerful Edax is.

Edax is not a part of this project. You need go HERE, click Clone or download button, download the source and build it. Don't download release version 4.4. It dosen't work.

cd edax/project/path
mkdir -p bin

cd src
make build ARCH=x64 COMP=your-compiler OS=your-os

Then go HERE, download eval.7z, unzip to the directory where the Edax executable is. Next, copy them all to edax folder in this project.

├── ...
├── log
│   ├── ...
│   └── ...
├── edax
│   ├── data
│   │   └── eval.dat
│   └── Edax
├── othello.py
├── tree.py
├── ...

OK

python othello.py --play-with-edax

Play with human

You can play with othello-zero on the command line.

python othello.py --play-with-human

Then

=================
  A B C D E F G H
1 ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐
2 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
3 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
4 ├─┼─┼─○─●─×─┼─┤
5 ├─┼─┼─●─●─●─┼─┤
6 ├─┼─┼─×─┼─×─┼─┤
7 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤
8 └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘

●black plays F5.
it's ○white turn.
>

Just type your move, such as F4, and press Enter.

Milestone

Date	othello-zero version	Achievement
2018-11-28	V1 -> V6	None
2018-11-29	V7 -> V12	V10 defeated me :-)
2018-11-30	V13 -> V18	V14 defeated Edax Lv.1
2018-12-01	V19 -> V24	None
2018-12-02	V25 -> V30	V26 defeated Edax Lv.2
2018-12-03	V31 -> V36	Abandon
2018-12-04	V31 -> V36	None
2018-12-05	V37 -> V42	None
2018-12-06	V43 -> V48	V43 defeated Edax Lv.3
2018-12-07	V49 -> V54	None
2018-12-08	V55 -> V57	None
2018-12-09	V58 -> V63	None
2018-12-10	V64 -> V69	V67 defeated Edax Lv.4
2018-12-11	V70 -> V78	None
2018-12-12	V79 -> V87	None
2018-12-13	V88 -> V96	None
2018-12-14	V97 -> V105	None
2018-12-15	V106 -> V114	None
2018-12-16	V115 -> V117	Suspended

2018-12-03: train_echo_max was changed from 50 to 100, but I'm not satisfied with the result, so then undid this change the next day.

2018-12-08: self_play_echo_max was changed from 2 to 4.

2018-12-09: train_echo_max was changed from 50 to 100.

2018-12-16: othello-zero is close to Edax Lv.5, but hard to defeat it. I suspend this project.

Data

On the releases page you can download:

• All key checkpoints, such as V1, V10, V20 and so on.

• Whole loss-log file includes policy-loss and value-loss.

checkpoint File

The checkpoint file is just a bookmark file. You can create it manually.

Create a new text file named checkpoint. Edit it. Here is a example, just one line:

model_checkpoint_path: "v117-14797350"

You can replace v117-14797350 with any checkpoint name such as v001-49150.

In this way, you can choose different checkpoints to restore, and compare them.

Comparison

	AlphaGo Zero	AlphaZero	othello-zero
ResNet blocks	20 or 40	20	10
History features	8	8	4
Dirichlet noise α	0.03	Chess 0.3 Shogi 0.15 Go 0.03	0.5
Learning rate	-->400K 10^-2 -->600K 10^-3 600K--> 10^-4	-->400K 10^-2 -->600K 10^-3 600K--> 10^-4	10^-2
Transform the board position during MCTS	Yes	No	No
Virtual loss	Yes	Yes	No
Model that generates new games	The best	The latest	The latest
The replacement of old games for training	Smooth	Smooth	Complete

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Presented by doBell. We are so proud of this.
来自 doBell 团队，我们为此倍感荣光。