On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 04:03:47PM -0400, Don Dailey wrote: > > On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 14:36 -0400, Matt Kingston wrote: > > What I want from a commercial go playing program is one that I can use > > to learn to be a better go player. [...] > > I have heard this argument before, but I personally do not > subscribe to it. Please let me explain why.
Here I must side with Matt Kingston. If I would be learning Go only from playing a computer program, I would like to learn a bit of the endgame techniques, even if I am loosing anyway. That would be impossible with a program that aims to win by precisely 0.5 points. Likewise with the middle game. As long as the computer wins the game in the opening, it can play what ever strange moves in the middle game, and I will have a hard time learning anything from it. > Of what learning purpose is it if you are losing the game and > the computer gets you to focus on a dramatic battle somewhere > that is totally irelevant? Maybe not a 'dramatic battle', but good habits like playing sente yose before gote yose, and not playing a first-line hane if you don't come back and connect it. > In fact this is how beginners think about the game. It doesn't > seem to me like a good learning aid to try to get the computers > to "emulate" the losing strategy weaker players use. Weaker players can not estimate the score until very late in the game. Not with enough precision, anyway. Thus, most of the time they have no idea if they are winning or loosing by 0.5 points. Then the most obvious strategy must be to maximize your score, so that even in case of an error in the evaluation or an error in the endgame, the result would still be favourable. This ought to apply to computer programs too, as long as we have much uncertainty in the evaluation functions. - Heikki -- Heikki Levanto "In Murphy We Turst" heikki (at) lsd (dot) dk _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
