Jungle Chess on Mistboard has a new top bot. It is KataGo-AnimalChess, hzyhhzy's KataGomo built on lightvector's KataGo, playing with the b10c384 network from Dandelion 4 by Kouza (lxsgx23). We play it here with hzyhhzy's permission, under the name KataGo.
KataGo learned Jungle Chess by playing itself, the way AlphaZero learned chess. A neural network proposes moves and judges positions, and a search checks its ideas. No other engine taught it.
Before putting it on the site, we played it against Misty, our own Jungle Chess bot, in an open challenge of 200 games at 1,000 visits a move. hzyhhzy's engine won 82, lost none and drew 118, a score of 0.705. Every win came from walking into Misty's den, and every draw was a repetition.
We scored every position of two of those wins again with both engines, at the match settings. Each chart shows one number, KataGo's chance of winning, judged twice: once by KataGo and once by Misty. Where the lines part, the engines disagree about who is winning. A draw counts as half a win, and Misty's centipawns become a chance through the curve our analysis board uses, 1 / (1 + e^(−0.00368 × cp)).
Game 67: a wolf up, and lost
Misty, playing red, won a wolf on move 11 and read itself ahead for most of the game, while KataGo's score stayed at 50% and then climbed.
On move 29 Misty moved its cornered tiger from g8 to g9, and KataGo's score for itself went from 61% to 92% while Misty still read +111. KataGo's line for red starts with lion b1-b2 and keeps red at 37%. Misty only saw it on move 36, seven moves later.
Game 94: the slow squeeze
Misty, playing black, won a wolf on move 19 and read itself ahead for most of the next 30 moves, while KataGo's score crept from 50% to 63%.
On move 50 Misty moved its cat from c8 to c7, and KataGo went from 63% to 98%. Misty read +80 and found the forced loss two moves later. KataGo's line for black, elephant d6-d7, keeps black at 38%.
In these two games, KataGo saw the win seven moves and two moves before Misty did.
Misty is still where you start
KataGo is at the top of the Jungle Chess bot list, above Misty. Misty stays the default and the easier opponent; pick KataGo when you want the stronger game. Game review and analysis for Jungle Chess still run on Misty.
On the site KataGo searches 150 visits a move, which takes about 1.5 to 3.5 seconds. At that setting it scored 19 wins, no losses and 31 draws in 50 games against Misty, 0.690, which cannot be told apart from the 1,000-visit result. The strength is in the network.
Thanks
KataGomo is open source at github.com/hzyhhzy/KataGomo. Thank you, hzyhhzy, for the engine and for letting us use it; lightvector, for KataGo; and Kouza, for the Dandelion 4 network.