This discussion reminds me of a naive theory that I sometimes wonder about:
Since the players in the playouts are so weak, it seems like the improving the ability to defend a strong position from a not-very-clever move (and not lose it via a blunder) should be more important than improving the ability to find an attack. If there are two equally bad players that can easily attack each other but can't defend, it seems like the results will be close to random, almost regardless of starting position, unless it is very strong. On the other hand, if two bad players are somewhat better at defense but lousy at seeing weaknesses in the other side, there will be less noise and the one with more territory will tend to win, but an attack on a mostly solid position will sometimes be found via a random move, and given enough playouts, this will result in the probability of defense with a weakness being slightly lower than a truly winning position. It seems like this effect would be especially true of the endgame where there aren't so many points to take, but a position could be lost due to a blunder. I'm not sure how useful that is, since to defend a position you need to know how it might be attacked, but perhaps it leads somewhere? - Brian _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
