On Sat, 2008-08-09 at 12:21 +0100, Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
> Don Dailey wrote:
> > Much the same as in GO, where 10 -15 years ago the idea of Dan level
> > play was so far off it was considered completely unattainable by
> > pessimists, and even optimists viewed it as a century away.
>
> Where did you get that impression?
You don't have to go back to the archives, I'll give you something that
you can find on the web right now that retains the old fashion thinking.
But first ...
I don't know what I was thinking when I said optimists felt it was 100
years away. That certainly wouldn't make them optimists would it? In
fact that is how pessimists felt. I was probably typing this very
quickly and not proof-reading it before I sent it.
I easily found an article on the web that has the feel of the type of
pessimism I'm talking about. The author of this page sets up a straw
man, shoots it down, and indirectly implicates any approach that uses
look-ahead. Then in the final "Future Directions of Research" no type
of global search is even mentioned so the page is essentially out of
date.
Of course hind-sight is 20/20. I don't fault people for making faulty
prognostications. I'm just trying to make the point that as a whole we
have been pretty short-sighted in thinking that global search of any
kind was out of the question.
If you look on the intelligentgo.org page:
http://www.intelligentgo.org/en/computer-go/overview.html
The context of the discussion is the feasibility of using search. Here
is a quote of one paragraph:
But won't ever-improving computer performance make up for these
gaps? Not likely. A very rough estimate might be that the
evaluation function is, at best, 100 times slower than chess,
and the branching factor is four times greater at each ply;
taken together, the performance requirements for a chess-like
approach to Go can be estimated as 1027 times greater than that
for computer chess. Moore's law holds that computing power
doubles every 18 months, so that means we might have a computer
that could play Go using these techniques sometime in the 22nd
century. In summary, Go's high branching factor and complex
evaluation function virtually preclude use of the tried-and-true
techniques applied to solving chess. That's why today's Go
programs are a mélange of heuristics and specialized modules.
This is not a page out of the 80's or 90's. It is representative of
thinking that has not yet aged out of the public domain. Most ideas,
whether good or bad end up getting cut and pasted and propagated over
and over again refusing to die.
Perhaps the most notorious example is in computer checkers. Jonathan
Schaeffer's book, One Jump Ahead has a chapter with the title, "Didn't
Samuel Solve That Game?" In 1962 Dr. Samuel's checkers program won a
single game against a weak player who claimed to be a "master" but had
no record of any kind indicating he played in tournaments or defended
any titles. It received a lot of press, it was exaggerated and from
that point on in the public consciousness checkers had already been
solved. For decades after that, the concept was cut and pasted into
press articles and the idea wouldn't die. The reality is that Dr.
Samuel's program sucked. It was an amazing achievement for 1962 but no
reasonably strong checker program existed until decades later.
Here is what Jonathan says about this in his book:
The legacy of Samuel's program would haunt anyone who tried to use
checkers as an experimental research test bed for decades to come. The
perception that checkers is a "solved" game persists up to the present.
Many scientific and popular publications continue to perpetuate the
myth. A sample of the nonsense includes:
"...it seems safe to predict that within ten years, checkers
will be a completely decidable game." Richard Bellman,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 53(1965): p. 246
...
"Although computers had long since been unbeatable at such basic
games as checkers ..." Clark Whelton, Horizon, February 1978.
(I only included 2 samples, but he had several.)
I think it's rather dangerous to make wild claims, especially if you are
perceived as an expert in that area. When events such as what we have
just witnessed (Mogo vs Kim) occurs, we have to be extremely careful
about what we say or claim has happened (wild exuberance.) It will get
published, then cut and pasted until the end of time.
- Don
>
> I've recently spent some time reading the archives of (the predecessors
> of) this mailing list from the mid-90s, and my impression is very
> different. I'd say the optimists were predicting 1 dan (AGA) in 10
> years, and the pessimists were saying rather longer.
>
>
> This quote from a prominent list member in 1996 is not untypical:
>
> <<
> I'm not saying that you can get to shodan just by taking today's
> programs and running them on a machine 100 times faster. I'm saying that
> a 100 times faster machine is needed to run the new algorithms that will
> be developed for a shodan strength program.
> >>
>
> -M-
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