On Sat, 2008-10-11 at 22:33 +0100, Raymond Wold wrote:
> Ingo Althöfer wrote:
> > During the last few days I have been meditating a lot about
> > the questiion whether taking into account the margin of
> > win into MCTS (UCT) may help or hurt.

You are not alone!   I think most of us have looked into that.

> > I do not have a go program by my own, so for the moment
> > I have to believe what programmers are saying, namely
> > that "MCTS with margin of win as a criterion" gives worse
> > performance in play against other computer programs.

It seems that way so far but you never know.

> 
> I think the computer go field has a lot of magical thinking like this. 
> Where a couple of different teams try out an idea, no one can get it to 
> work, and so everyone believes the idea is no good.

I couldn't say it better myself.   In fact I have dropped my own ideas,
only to make them work later.   One can never be completely sure there
is not a bug, or some implementation detail that seemed unimportant
caused a problem.

> 
> The truth is we don't know. Most of computer go is very empirical and 
> ad-hoc. We don't know why playing out a game randomly many times gives a 
> good approximation of winning chance (I'm sure I could design games 
> where this is not true). Using the margin and not just win/loss would 
> intuitively seem to mean a higher margin of error in this estimate, so 
> that a lot more play-outs are needed to take advantage of any added 
> information. But that would really just be another guess.

Are you speculating that if enough play-outs are done,  the idea might
prove to be superior?    I never actually considered that.   So perhaps
with 5000 playouts using the win/loss score wins,  but at 50,000 using
the margin might be better?   This is easy to test with simple MC go
programs.    If I get a chance I will test it for you (since you do not
have a program of your own) and report the results.   I'm not holding my
breath however ...


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