What activity is there in Computer Go tournaments?

Question

At the moment, the 17th TCEC superfinal is running, Stockfish vs. Leela. It is considered the unofficial world championship of computer chess, and games are frequently publicly commentated by professional chess players. TCEC runs tournaments continuously, 2-4 of them every year.

Given the advance of Go programs, I wonder whether there are well-organized computer Go tournaments. I found the Computer Go UEC Cup, but Wikipedia says it took place annually from 2007-2017 and has stopped; also, its website has not been updated for several years. There is slightly confusing further information about a follow-up tournament in 2019, which points to Japanese websites.

Hence my questions:

1) Where can one get information in English about the UEC Cup? Do most state-of-the-art programs participate?

2) Are there other computer Go tournaments?

Answer 1

The Computer Go Server¹ is currently a very active test bed for bots. The Computer Go page at Sensei’s Library refers, under Competitions, to various competitions including the Computer Go Server, with its own page at Sensei’s Library, which gives the URL¹. On that site, you will find daily updated tables of bots for 9×9, 13×13 and 19×19, These refer to the Bayes ELO ratings pages (on the same site) where for example the 19×19 page as I write (2020-04-19 22:17) shows 1064 programmes ranging in strength from DunceBot at 538 to KG30b11_406_2x2060 at 3387. The non-Bayes page shows the date+time of the most recent game by each bot, showing that a game was played some two hours ago.

The page http://www.computer-go.info/events/index.html, though was described at Sensei’s Library as showing “all competitions” in fact covers the dates 1920–2017².

I know no more than you of what has become of the UEC Cup. Surprisingly, none of the AlphaGo variants appear although one convincingly defeated a top professional, Lee Sedol, in 2016; more recent bots such as LeelaZero (released 2017-10-25) and KataGo (released 2019) appeared after the UEC Cup apparently stopped.

¹ _{The current URL is http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/ . Sensei’s also gave the URL http://cgos.boardspace.net/, but this appears not to work, which I have noted in Sensei’s.}

² _{I have updated Sensei’s accordingly.}