Quoting Don Dailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
How clear is it that the correct Komi is 9 and not another value? Has
it been proved, or is just strongly believed? And how strongly?
It is very clear in my opinion. This citation comes from sgf file that
has been
circulating for some time
"
In the American GO Journal (vol. 29, number 3, summer '95), James Davies had
this to say: "On a 7x7 board, Go becomes challenging for even the strongest
human players. The challenge (find the best moves for both sides) was taken up
in 1977 by a group of Japanese amateurs including Kiga Yasuo, Nebashi
Teruichi,
Noro Natsuo and Yamashita Isao. In 1989, with some professional help from Kudo
Norio and Nakayama Noriyuki, they reached the conclusion that Black wins by
nine points. What follows is a tip-of-the-iceberg summary of the evidence. It
should be added that the analysis is still somewhat tentative, and future
discoveries may lead to further revisions."
"
My guess is that these amateurs very strong, because you need to be.
The reason
I strongly believe in it is that is very consistent with my experience of 7x7.
Everytime a short game is played with good logical moves from both side the
result just happens to support 9.5 komi most of the time. Note that the
japanese team spent 12 years on this analysis indicating that it was far from
easy. Further revisions I interprete as possible changes to the list of moves
that are correct and incorrect and not the komi itself.
So my conclusion is
a)7x7 is far from trivial
b) The analysis done to find the solution was some really hard work and needed
professional strength for the finishing touch.
c) Because we now can apply this knowledge in an opening library strong
programs
can get even stronger, but this fact might hide how much knowledge is hidden
behind this simple opening library.
Still 7x7 is very useful for me. I simply turn the opening library off. It is
much quicker and easier to get an overall impression of new versions of
Valkyria playing 7x7 rather than 9x9. It also more fun because with some
thinking time Valkyria can go very deep on 7x7. Thus one can get a feeling for
the dynamics of the program when it searches very deep.
So having the solutions is a mixed blessing: it is ideal as a benchmark
to test
our programs with but on the other hand it makes it harder to make meaningful
tournaments for 7x7 although one might start with 4 random ply having both
programs play both colors or something like that.
-Magnus
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
