i'm saying that if a factor of 50 extra time can make your program strong enough to be 'impressive', then you know that you're within a reasonable hardware 'scaling distance' of playing that strong at regular timeframes.
if, on the other hand, you're *not* (which would be easy to see by performing my experiment with the putatively scalable player getting the factor of 50 time advantage over a few otherwise similarly-ranked computer players who have normal time constraints) seeing a massive advantage with a factor of 50 time advantage, then you're *not* within a small scalable factor of having a piece of code which, whatever the technique and hardware, is objectively 'strong'. given that the second is the case, worrying about performance as a function of time as opposed to worrying about absolute strength is a little bit silly. to state this more simply, it only really matters to measure strength as a function of thinking time if changing the thinking time affects the level of play significantly. and given that it doesn't, it does make good sense to emphasize the 'absolute' level of play. to see what i'm saying in action, if we were to dump a few copies of gnugo into a slow-motion tournament, one of which always played black with 2 stones handicap, one of which always played black with 3 stones handicap, etc., etc., and all of which were told that they only had, say, 30 minutes to make all of their moves (while their opponents were given 24 hours), we could see just how much stronger everyone's programs are *even with* a factor of 50 time advantage. my guess, after watching the last tournament, is that all of the players involved last time would still be within a few stones of gnugo -- that the factor of 50 time advantage didn't make anyone massively stronger. heck, i doubt that a factor of 50 time advantage would make *gnugo* more than a few stones stronger than itself. of course, all of this is easily verified. :) s. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Cheap talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates. http://voice.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
