Rémi Coulom

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Rémi Coulom, a French computer scientist, freelance programmer in the field of artificial intelligence in games, and former associate professor (Maître de Conférences) of computer science at the Charles de Gaulle University – Lille III, and a member of the GRAPPA and SequeL research groups, in Lille, France. Rémi contributed to computer chess with his famous chess program The Crazy Bishop, the Bayesian Elo Rating system and the Treemap search-tree visualization. The Crazy Bishop was one of the pioneers in supporting the Chess Engine Communication Protocol.

His more recent research interests focus on the more challenging domains. His Lines of Action program Lola and Computer Go playing program Crazy Stone deal with Monte-Carlo Tree Search and Neural Networks, and as of May 2016, Deep Learning. His generic AlphaZero implementation dubbed CrazyZero has networks trained to play Go, Shogi, Gomoku, Othello, Renju, and Chess.

Rémi is further co-author of Erica in supervising primary author Aja Huang. At the Advances in Computer Games 13 conference in Tilburg, 2011, Rémi introduced CLOP, Confident Local Optimization for Noisy Black-Box Parameter Tuning. Rémi Coulom was board member of the ICGA as Programmers Representative, superseded in November 2011 by Mark Lefler. He also did the excellent Web site development of the ICGA Tournament Database.

=Photos=

The Crazy Bishop
from the 9th French Computer Chess Championship, Massy, 2002 Chess Wizard vs The Crazy Bishop, Frédéric Louguet, Rémi Coulom, FCCC 2002 Stéphane, Jean-Philippe, Bernard, Sylvain, Franck, Frédéric, Bruno L, Pascal, Bruno B, Rémi, Eric

Gold with Crazy Stone
11th Computer Olympiad, Go 9x9, Ken Chen, Rémi Coulom, Hiroshi Yamashita and Jaap van den Herik =Open Source= Post by Rémi Coulom on open source 1997 : In the last release of The Crazy Bishop, I have added a part of the source code. Here is what I added to the web page:

''I will not distribute the source code of TCB. I fear that distributing it can have unpleasant consequences, such as the risk of meeting a modified version in a tournament, which happened to Crafty in Jakarta. I think that keeping the code secret is a good way to preserve the fun of competition.''

''However, this distribution includes the source code of the C++ chess library used by TCB, along with a very simple (and poor) chess engine demonstrating how to use it. This chess library could be useful for people wanting to write their own chess program. By subclassing the CEngine class, you will be able to concentrate on the programming of the chess engine only, and the class library will give you for free a console user interface, xboard/Zippy interface, search tree analysis tools, pgn file input/output, and more to come in future versions. Since no programer showed interest in this class library yet, it is not documented for more than my personal use. If my code raises some interest among programmers, I will add the necessary documentation.''

Some students in a French school have to write a chess program as a project, and decided to use my chess library. This means that I will probably add documentation soon.

By the way, new improvements will be added very soon to my web page. (probably before tomorrow). I am testing changes I have made this week end before I publish them. TCB 0026 is now about 10% faster than the previous version, with a better positional evaluation.

Rémi

=Selected Publications=

2000 ...

 * Rémi Coulom (2002). Treemaps for Search-Tree Visualization. 7th Computer Olympiad Workshop, pdf
 * Rémi Coulom (2004). The Massy 2004 Computer Chess Tournament. ICGA Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3 » Massy 2004

2005 ...

 * Rémi Coulom, Ken Chen (2006). Crazy Stone wins 9x9 Go tournament. ICGA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2 » 11th Computer Olympiad
 * Rémi Coulom, Ken Chen (2006). Gnu Go wins 19x19 Go tournament. ICGA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2 » 11th Computer Olympiad
 * Rémi Coulom (2006). Efficient Selectivity and Backup Operators in Monte-Carlo Tree Search. CG 2006, pdf
 * Rémi Coulom (2007). Computing Elo Ratings of Move Patterns in the Game of Go. CGW 2007
 * Rémi Coulom (2007). Computing Elo Ratings of Move Patterns in the Game of Go. ICGA Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4, pdf
 * Rémi Coulom (2007). Monte-Carlo Tree Search in Crazy Stone. sides as pdf
 * Rémi Coulom (2008). Crazy Stone wins First UEC Cup. ICGA Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, pdf
 * Rémi Coulom (2008). Whole-History Rating: A Bayesian Rating System for Players of Time-Varying Strength. CG 2008, draft as pdf
 * Rémi Coulom (2009). The Monte-Carlo Revolution in Go. JFFoS'2008: Japanese-French Frontiers of Science Symposium, slides as pdf

2010 ...

 * Łukasz Lew, Rémi Coulom (2010). Simulation-based Search of Combinatorial Games. ICML 2010, pdf
 * Shih-Chieh Huang, Rémi Coulom, Shun-Shii Lin (2010). Monte-Carlo Simulation Balancing in Practice. CG 2010, pdf
 * Shih-Chieh Huang, Rémi Coulom, Shun-Shii Lin (2010). Monte-Carlo Simulation Balancing applied to 9x9 Go. ICGA Journal, Vol. 33, No. 4
 * Shih-Chieh Huang, Rémi Coulom, Shun-Shii Lin (2011). Time Management for Monte-Carlo Tree Search Applied to the Game of Go. TAAI 2010, pdf
 * Rémi Coulom, Philippe Rolet, Nataliya Sokolovska, Olivier Teytaud (2011). Handling Expensive Optimization with Large Noise. pdf
 * Rémi Coulom (2011). CLOP: Confident Local Optimization for Noisy Black-Box Parameter Tuning. Advances in Computer Games 13
 * Ingo Althöfer, Raymond Georg Snatzke (2014). The codecentric Go Challenge 2014: Franz-Josef Dickhut vs. CRAZY STONE. ICGA Journal, Vol. 37, No. 4

=Forum Posts=

1997 ...

 * Chess C++ class library source code released by Rémi Coulom, rgcc April 1, 1997
 * Ideas to reduce size of tablebases by Rémi Coulom, CCC, August 31, 1998 » Endgame Tablebases
 * About releasing engine source code by Rémi Coulom, CCC, February 15, 1999
 * Hash collisions and a little maths by Rémi Coulom, CCC, February 18, 1999 » Transposition Table
 * Q. about Rebel extensions by Rémi Coulom, CCC, May 18, 1999 » Extensions, Rebel
 * Evaluation of pawn races by Rémi Coulom, CCC, August 21, 1999 » Pawn Race
 * Parallel search development on a single processor machine ? by Rémi Coulom, CCC, August 21, 1999 » Parallel Search

2000 ...

 * Search tree visualization with treemaps by Rémi Coulom, CCC, August 26, 2001
 * Treemap for search tree visualization : screenshots by Rémi Coulom, CCC, September 23, 2001
 * Statistical significance of a match result by Rémi Coulom, CCC, November 23, 2002 » Match Statistics
 * Announcement: French computer-chess meeting in Massy on June 20th by Rémi Coulom, CCC, April 21, 2004 » Massy 2004
 * Position from Ramat-Gan by Rémi Coulom, CCC, July 16, 2004 » WCCC 2004
 * New tool to estimate the statistical significance of match results by Rémi Coulom, CCC, July 17, 2004 » Match Statistics
 * Report on Massy'2004 and Announce of FCCC'2004 by Rémi Coulom, CCC, July 19, 2004 » FCCC 2004
 * ELOStat algorithm ? by Rémi Coulom, Winboard Forum, December 10, 2004

2005 ...

 * Question to 64 bit experts by Rémi Coulom, CCC, January 19, 2005
 * bayeselo: new Elo-rating tool, applied to CCT7 by Rémi Coulom, CCC, February 13, 2005 » CCT7

2010 ...

 * Tool for automatic black-box parameter optimization released by Rémi Coulom, CCC, June 20, 2010
 * CLOP for Noisy Black-Box Parameter Optimization by Rémi Coulom, CCC, September 01, 2011
 * Anybody tried Logistello's book learning for chess? by Rémi Coulom, CCC, December 29, 2013 » Book Learning, Michael Buro

2015 ...

 * Game AI Forum + ICGA Tournaments moving from univ-lille3.fr by Rémi Coulom, CCC, January 02, 2016
 * Game Over by Rémi Coulom, The Computer-go Archives, January 27, 2016 » AlphaGo
 * Re: To TPU or not to TPU... by Rémi Coulom, CCC, December 16, 2017
 * Re: On-line engine blitz tourney April by Rémi Coulom, CCC, April 27, 2019 » CrazyZero
 * Question to Remi about CrazyZero by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, April 28, 2019

=External Links=
 * Rémi Coulom's Home Page
 * Crazy Stone
 * Crazy Sensei
 * Bayesian Elo Rating
 * CLOP for Noisy Black-Box Parameter Optimization


 * Rémi Coulom from Wikipedia
 * Rémi Coulom's ICGA Tournaments
 * Rémi Coulom - Google Scholar Citations
 * Coulom, Rémi from computer-go.info
 * The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win by Alan Levinovitz, Wired, May 12, 2014
 * codecentric go challenge 2014: Interviews with Franz-Josef Dickhut and Rémi Coulom - codecentric Blog by Raymond Georg Snatzke, October 1, 2014
 * codecentric go challenge 2014: Final Interviews - codecentric Blog by Raymond Georg Snatzke, November 27, 2014
 * Rémi Coulom on AlphaGo and Marco Gori Lecture Learning from Constraints, February 29, 2016, YouTube Video

=References=

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