Hello Josef, hello all, "Josef Moudrik" <[email protected]> > ... As far as I know, combinatorial game theory is not used > in modern Go engines, despite its nice theoretical properties.
Let me tell you an anecdote from CGT history: In Februar 2002, there was a week-long conference on "Algorithmic Combinatorial Game Theory" in "Schloss Dagstuhl" (Germany). It was years before the Monte Carlo revolution, and in those days many hopes for strong go bots were on CGT. In the beginning of the week, the simple board game Clobber (perfectly suited for use of CGT) was introduced - and a human Clobber tournament was planned for the evenings. I proposed to write a Clobber bot (without using CGT), and two other participants followed me. Within hours, our bots were ready. And they crushed the humans (on 6x5 board size) terribly. So, "we" were excluded from the evening tournament (and had to play our own bot competition). The only comment on my bot by senior Elwyn Berlekamp (one of the fathers of modern CGT; co-author of "Winning ways") was: Why does it have such an ugly graphical interface? It seemed, Prof. Berlekamp was dis- appointed by the fact that Clobber bots were so strong without using any CGT. Photo with (almost) the whole group of 2002-participants: https://www.dagstuhl.de/Gruppenbilder/02081.A.B.JPG In the very first row (sitting): third person from left is John Tromp (the man from the Tromp-Taylor rules, from the Tromp-Cook bet, from go position counting and and and). In the same row the man with the diagonal go board is Martin Mueller. Directly behind Martin stands Richard Nowakowski (with red shirt), co-inventor of Clobber (in Summ,er 2001, together with M.H. Albert and J.P. Grossman). https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=02081 Looking forward to meet you in Liberec! Ingo. _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
