I appreciate that Go programs are complex and not easy to tune.
Thinking over Magnus' excellent automated method ( play many games, allow early
resignation, inspect long games ), and my own experiences, I'd like to suggest
an additional method: when a game ends with a large loss, determine
retroactively a) how far back the program was doomed but deluded about the
outcome, and b) what the correct earlier plays would have been. Tune and test
with a regression suite of difficult positions. This is like troubleshooting
any other large and complex program; a subtle error in one portion may only
reveal itself when a "perfect storm" of circumstances arises - but the bug is
there all the time.
As Magnus and Valkyria pointed out, proper play at an earlier point in my
example game would have destroyed Black's position. I don't feel so proud now,
lol.
At my level of play, it is distressingly common to mis-read capturing races --
it's possible that a good understanding of that topic would improve Go
programs. The difficulty cannot be understated - others have indicated that
Hunter's Counting Liberties and Winning Capturing Races book, valuable as it
may be, misses some cases. As Hunter observes, even dan-level players sometimes
make mistakes in capturing races.
Programs which get semeai and seki right every time might be a few stones
stronger. They'd certainly be more valuable as teaching tools. In the game
above, a stronger program would have exploited my earlier weakness; this would
have encouraged me to make better moves.
Back to "Roadmap: 2020", I'd love a "status map" showing groups which are
certainly alive, groups which are unstable, and groups which are certainly dead
( assuming proper play ). That would be quite a feedback tool. When an approach
move or throw-in threatens the status of a group, the group marker would change
from green to blinking yellow. When the attack succeeds, the group marker would
change to red. To be useful, this tool would have to be accurate. If not 100%
accurate, it should at least give some indication of its level of confidence.
Even better, especially for double-digit-kyu players, would be an exposition of
why a group is live, dead, seki, unstable, etc.
Terry McIntyre <terrymcint...@yahoo.com>
"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."
- Leo Tolstoy
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