Hi Dan, hi friends, > There is actually no randomness in the algorithm, just like AlphaZero's...
but then it does not make sense to call that algorithm "rollout". ****************************************************** In general: when introducing a new name, care should be taken that the name describes properly what is going on. * When Bernd Brügmann introduced the name "Monte Carlo Go" back in 1993, it did very properly describe the behavior of the algorithm. * When Rémi Coulom introduced the term "Monte Carlo Tree Search" back in 2005, this described very well - for more then ten years of development - what the algorithm was doing. (Although, over the years it became obvious that the rollouts had only a small degree of randomness in strong engines.) * When the AlphaGo team used the name "MCTS" to describe AlphaGo's search without rollouts but with NN-evaluations instead, things became problematic. AlphaGo still used the tree search part of MCTS, but no longer in combination with rollouts. * And when now someone (Dan) looks at alpha-beta with single-node extensions instead of iterative deepening, "rollouts" is a completely misleading term. I can not predict if Dan's approach will be successful. In any case, he should look for another proper name to describe it. Ingo. PS. One example from the history of astronomy: For many centuries seven planets were known (from Mercury to Saturn). And suddenly Galilei got a (little) telescope (in 1609/1910) and discoverd four new planets [sic!] around Jupiter. It took a while until these moons were not called planets any longer. And, when in 1801, asteroid Ceres was discovered and in the following years/decades a good handful of other asteroids, they first were called planets, later planetoids, and nowadays finally asteroids. So, there the are chances to repair wrong names - but it costs energy, and in the meantime confusion has happened. _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list Computer-go@computer-go.org http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
