On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 14:04 +0900, Darren Cook wrote:
> >> My point being that a top pro will find a high quality move in the time
> >> it takes him to move the mouse from one side of the board to the other.
> >
> > But still it's *WAY* below his normal tournament playing strength to
> > play so quickly...
>
> Everything I know about the way top pros play says the opposite: quickly
> diminishing returns from extra time. The first move they think of is
> often the one they will choose even after 10 minutes of study.
Hi Darren,
What do you mean by diminishing returns? You don't get 10 ELO
stronger
for every second of thinking time, it's not linear like this. I think
you are "suffering" from a human perception issue which I will explain
in
a moment, but first ...
With computer chess it's well documented that you get an enormous
strength
improvement with each doubling of speed. Over the years this has
fallen
off - it used to be close to 100 ELO but I think it's more like 50 ELO
now.
However, doubling the thinking time USUALLY didn't make it play a
different
move. In fact, today the top programs play a great move instantly
most
of the time. Even the older much weaker programs found the best move
very quickly and never changed their minds. And yet they still
improved
hundreds of ELO points when hardware continued to get faster. How can
this
be?
The answer is that only a few moves make the difference. Even weak
players
play the same moves that grandmasters play - it's only the occasional
move
that makes all the difference.
So your intuition is correct that strong players play great moves
quickly,
but that has little to do with what is required to bring this up a
notch.
Now, about the time perception issue. I can explain this best with an
anecdote:
Years ago, I marketed a chess program and I received a lot
of correspondence and feedback from my customers. Do you know
what the most cliched comment was? It went like this: "I
really like your program but I kept beating it at 5 seconds so
I doubled the level and it didn't play any stronger."
Of course they were quite wrong - it DID play stronger - perhaps 60 ELO
rating points.
But they had unrealistic expectations about what a doubling of time
really means. 60 ELO is significant, but statistically it would take
a really long match to measure it accurately. You are not going to
play a couple of games and say, "WOW, this is a LOT stronger!"
A commercial GO program must have a mode where it plays moves very
quickly. Why? Because nobody will buy it otherwise. It's
biological, we get impatient waiting for a move after a few seconds.
Double the thinking time and it plays significantly stronger, but not
enough to be immediately noticed. What we WILL notice is that most
of the moves are the same - and human perception is better at making
quick binary judgments, i.e. "it still stinks, it's not any better!"
I'm suggesting that it's no different with us humans, in fact I'm
absolutely convinced of it. If you ignore human frailties, such
as attention span and ability to focus for long periods of time -
us humans will play MUCH stronger given a few hundred percent
extra time. It won't make us play EVERY move better - a reasonably
good player probably plays a lot of moves correctly. But that's
not what makes the difference between a good player and a better
player. It's those difficult moves that we require a lot of time
to work out.
I'll give you a hypothetical chess example to show you the limitations
of this. Let's take an 1800 ELO chess player. He has almost NO
chance of beating a top grandmaster. A tiny fraction of a percent
per game. Let's give him an acceleration potion that speeds up his
metabolism so that he can think 64 times faster. Instead of 3 minutes
he is thinking over an hour per move on average.
I assert that this 1800 player is now playing at least 300 points
stronger - about 2100 points. But guess what, he still has almost
no chance of beating the 2800 player. The skeptics will look at
the game, laugh, and say, "see, the extra time didn't help a bit."
> Do you, or anyone, have studies that deal with this, for go? (I saw your
> other post on chess, but I think this may be somewhere chess and go
> differ: perhaps due the emphasis in go on good shape?)
It's really hard to believe that GO cannot be studied but chess can.
I contend that this applies to any field of endeavor. Put a man on
the moon? You need a LOT of brainpower. It took a team of men
several years to "solve the problem." Playing games is just a
set of problems to be solved, some very easy some very difficult.
For a strong player most of the moves are easy - the difference
between 6 dan and 7 dan has nothing to do with "most of the moves",
it's just a very few highly critical difficult ones, perhaps just
one or two decisions.
Present a player with a set of difficult to solve problems and ask
him to solve them given 1 second per move. He might miss every
one of them. Give him 10 seconds and he might solve a few. Give
him 1 hour per move and he may solve most of them. Some may be
way above his level - if the problem is so profound that it takes
a several dan player to solve in 1 minute, then just using the
simple ELO type of calculation you might rightly conclude that a
20 kyu beginner would need centuries.
Actually, a 20 kyu play probably could solve it in a few years,
by using the strategy of spending his time on years of study to
become a dan level player. Then solving the problem with a few
hours of hard work.
- Don
> Darren
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> computer-go mailing list
> computer-go@computer-go.org
> http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
computer-go@computer-go.org
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
