It's not even just liberties and semeai, it's also eyes. Consider for
example a large dragon that has miai for 2 eyes in distant locations, and
the opponent then takes one of them - you'd like the policy net to now
suggest the other eye-making move far away. And you'd also like the value
net to distinguish the three situations where the whole group has 2 eyes
even when they are distant versus the ones where it doesn't.

I've been doing experiments with somewhat smaller neural nets (roughly 4-7
residual blocks = 8-14 layers), without sticking to an idealized "zero"
approach. I've only experimented with policy nets so far, but presumably
much of this should also transfer to a value net's understanding too.

1. One thing I tried was chain pooling, which was neat, but ultimately
didn't seem promising:
https://github.com/lightvector/GoNN#chain-pooling
It solves all of these problems when the strings are solidly connected. It
helps also when the strings are long but not quite solidly connected too,
the information still propagates faster than without it. But of course, if
there are lots of little strings forming a group, diagonal connections,
bamboo joints, etc, then of course it won't help. And also chain pooling is
computationally costly, at least in Tensorflow, and it might have negative
effects on the rest of the neural net that I don't understand.

2. A new thing I've been trying recently that actually does seem moderately
promising is dilated convolutions, although I'm still early in testing.
They also help increase the speed of information propagation, and don't
require solidly connected strings, and also are reasonably cheap.

In particular: my residual blocks have 192 channels, so I tried taking
several of the later residual blocks in the neural net and making 64 of the
channels of the first convolution in each block use dilated convolutions
(leaving 128 channels of regular convolutions), with dilation factors of 2
or 3. Intuitively, the idea is that earlier blocks could learn to compute
2x2 or 3x3 connectivity patterns, and then the dilated convolutions in
later residual blocks will be able to use that to propagate information
several spaces at a time across connected groups or dragons.

So far, indications are that this works. When I looked at it in various
board positions, it helped in a variety of capturing race and
large-dragon-two-eye-miai situations, correctly suggesting moves that the
net without dilated convolutions would fail to find due to the move being
too far away. Also dilated convolutions seem pretty cheap - it only
slightly increases the computational cost of the net.

So far, I've found that it doesn't significantly improve the overall loss
function, presumably because now there are 128 channels instead of 192
channels of ordinary convolutions, so in return for being better at
long-distance interactions, the neural net has gotten worse at some local
tactics. But it also hasn't gotten worse the way it would if I simply
dropped the number of channels from 192 to 128 without adding any new
channels, so the dilated convolutions are being "used" for real work.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone else has tried dilated convolutions and
what results they got. If there's anything at all to do other than just add
more layers, I think they're the most promising thing I know of.


On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 12:34 PM, Rémi Coulom <remi.cou...@free.fr> wrote:

> 192 and 256 are the numbers of channels. They are fully connected, so the
> number of 3x3 filters is 192^2, and 256^2.
>
> Having liberty counts and string size as input helps, but it solves only a
> small part of the problem. You can't read a semeai from just the
> liberty-count information.
>
> I tried to be clever and find ways to propagate information along strings
> in the network. But all the techniques I tried make the network much
> slower. Adding more layers is simple and works.
>
> Rémi
>
> ----- Mail original -----
> De: "Darren Cook" <dar...@dcook.org>
> À: computer-go@computer-go.org
> Envoyé: Mercredi 28 Février 2018 16:43:10
> Objet: Re: [Computer-go] Crazy Stone is back
>
> > Weights_31_3200 is 20 layers of 192, 3200 board evaluations per move
> > (no random playout). But it still has difficulties with very long
> > strings. My next network will be 40 layers of 256, like Master.
>
> "long strings" here means solidly connected stones?
>
> The 192 vs. 256 is the number of 3x3 convolution filters?
>
> Has anyone been doing experiments with, say, 5x5 filters (and fewer
> layers), and/or putting more raw information in (e.g. liberty counts -
> which makes the long string problem go away, if I've understood
> correctly what that is)?
>
> Darren
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