About Steenvreter

Steenvreter (stv on KGS) is a Go/Baduk/Weiqi program by Erik van der Werf. The program is written in C. The first version, which won the 2007 Olympiad, was written completely from scratch in 2006/2007 taking into account learnings from the author's earlier programs Magog and Migos. At the core of Steenvreter is a state-of-the-art MCTS engine with various Go-specific enhancements including a neural net (but not a deep net). Steenvreter has some built-in understanding of life and death, seki, semeais, supports both Chinese and Japanese rules, and in some cases it can prove perfect play (i.e., solve positions).

Download

A lite version of Steenvreter is included in GridMaster (Android app).

Results

• 2014:
  • 2nd place: 103^th KGS tournament - June 2014, report
• 2013:
  • 2nd place: 88^th KGS tournament - February 2013, report
• 2012:
  • Winner : 80^th KGS tournament - February 2012, report
  • 2nd place in various tournaments:
  • 88^th KGS tournament - December 2012, report
  • 85^th KGS tournament - August 2012, report
  • All 3 TCGA tournaments 9x9, 13x13, 19x19
  • 83^th KGS tournament - June 2012, report
  • Finished 3rd place in final standings of the 2012 Annual Championship (without participating in all rounds)
• 2011:
  • Winner : 78^th KGS tournament - December 2011, report
  • Silver medal in 19x19 tournament at the 16^th Computer Olympiad.
  • Silver medal in 13x13 tournament at the 16^th Computer Olympiad.
  (*1)
  • 3 / 9 : 77th KGS tournament - November 2011, report
  • 3 / 11 : 75th KGS tournament - September 2011, report
  • 4 / 17 : 70th KGS tournament - April 2011, report
• 2010:
  • 2 / 18 : KGS tournament - May 2010
  • 4 / 13 : KGS tournament - March 2010
  • 3 / 11 : KGS tournament - February 2010
• 2009:
  • Winner : KGS tournament - May 2009 (ahead of Computer Olympiad winners Zen and Fuego)
• 2008:
  • Winner : KGS tournament - April 2008 (perfect score!)
• 2007:
  • Gold medal in 9x9 tournament at the 12^th Computer Olympiad in Amsterdam (ahead of both MoGo and Crazy Stone)
  
  *1) Hardware is an important factor in the strength of modern Go programs. From its first appearance in 2007 to September 2011 Steenvreter ran all listed tournaments on a quad-core machine (Intel Q6600). As can be seen from the results it became increasingly difficult to keep up with the top using this old machine (some opponents use large clusters with in some cases even more than a thousand processors). The November 2011 KGS tournament was a first experiment using something slightly stronger (12 threads @ 2.2 GHz). The 2011 Olympiad games were played using 46 threads running at 2.2 GHz on a machine generously provided by the Maastricht Games and AI Group.

Publications

There is not a lot published specifically on Steenvreter. However, many of the ideas described in my PhD thesis are used in Steenvreter, so you could check out my older publications here. Further, if for some reason you specifically want to refer to Steenvreter then maybe the following publications are useful:

• Recent Advances in Computer Go. Nick Wedd (2007). British Go Journal Vol.143, Autumn, pp. 14-17.

• Steenvreter wins 9x9 Go Tournament. E.C.D. van der Werf (2007). ICGA Journal Vol.30, No. 2, pp. 109-110. [unedited version]

Contact information

To contact the author of Steenvreter send an email to: