On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 02:57:32PM -0500, Brian Sheppard wrote:
> I found the 14% win rate against Fuego is potentially impressive, but I 
> didn't get a sense for Fuego's effort level in those games. E.g., Elo 
> ratings. MCTS actually doesn't play particularly well until a sufficient 
> investment is made.

  Generally I'd expect Fuego in the described hardware configurations
and time seetings to be in 2k-1d KGS range.

> I am not sure what to think about winning 91% against Gnu Go. Gnu Go makes a 
> lot of moves based on rules, so it "replays" games. I found that many of 
> Pebbles games against Gnu Go were move-for-move repeats of previous games, so 
> much so that I had to randomize Pebbles if I wanted to use Gnu Go for 
> calibrating parameters. My guess is that the 91% rate is substantially 
> attributable to the way that Gnu Go's rule set interacts with the positions 
> that the NN likes. This could be a measure of strength, but not necessarily.

  That's an excellent point!

> My impression is that the progressive bias systems in MCTS programs should 
> prioritize interesting moves to search. A good progressive bias system might 
> have a high move prediction rate, but that will be a side-effect of tuning it 
> for its intended purpose. E.g., it is important to search a lot of bad moves 
> because you need to know for *certain* that they are bad.

  That sounds a bit backwards; it's enough to find a single good move,
you don't need to confirm that all other moves are worse.  Of course
sometimes this collapses to the same problem, but not nearly all the
time.

> Similarly, it is my impression is that a good progressive bias engine does 
> not have to be a strong stand-alone player. Strong play implies a degree of 
> tactical pattern matching that is not necessary when the system's 
> responsibility is to prioritize moves. Tactical accuracy should be delegated 
> to the search engine. The theoretical prediction is that MCTS search will be 
> (asymptotically) a better judge of tactical results.

  I don't think anyone would *aim* to make the move predictor as strong
as possible, just that everyone is surprised that it is so strong
"coincidentally". :-)

  Still, strong play makes sense for a strong predictor.  I believe I
can also beat GNUGo >90% of time in blitz settings without doing pretty
much *any* concious sequence reading.  So I would expect a module that's
supposed to mirror my intuition to do the same.

> Finally, I am not a fan of NN in the MCTS architecture. The NN architecture 
> imposes a high CPU burden (e.g., compared to decision trees), and this study 
> didn't produce such a breakthrough in accuracy that I would give away 
> performance.

  ...so maybe it is MCTS that has to go!  We could be in for more
surprises.  Don't be emotionally attached to your groups.

-- 
                                Petr Baudis
        If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely
        you'll do important work.  -- R. Hamming
        http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
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