Chrilly,
It is hard to disagree with what Jim writes, but I will in a small way.
When I recently flew to Asia, the screen on the seatback in front of
me offered Go as one of its games. At its highest level it played far
worse than the average program on CGOS or in a KGS computer
tournament, and yet somebody was paid by that airline for the use of
that program. And Go++ makes a living for its programmer.
There is money to be made in computer Go, but as Jim states, right
now the risk/reward ratio does not encourage most normal investors,
so it is for either 1) those with a high risk threshold, 2) those who
think more about research than production, 3) those motivated by how
hard it is and not put off by how much effort it is going to take, or
4) programmers of other games who underestimate how hard it really
is. Please do not take offense by number 4. I have huge respect for
your programming ability and am glad that you have joined us.
Cheers,
David
On 8, Jul 2007, at 8:36 AM, Jim O'Flaherty, Jr. wrote:
Chrilly,
The purpose of investment is to generate a return exceeding the
original investment, i.e. a profit. Given the state of Go, I am
finding it difficult to imagine why an investor would choose to put
any good money into Go. There is absolutely no reliable
expectation that Go will achieve even close to strong amateur
status (1D) in the next couple of years. It's possible some
wealthy person might decide to generously donate money into the
computer Go domain so as to forward his own passion, just as many
of the people here generously donate their own very valuable
personal time. Go is not a reasonable place to put investments.
At present and from everything I can see, computer Go development
depends upon personal passion and generosity. And sans a huge
breakthrough, I am currently unable to see this changing anytime soon.
That said, I think once Go AI becomes sufficiently and robustly
skilled to reliably start giving strong amateurs (>1D) genuinely
competitive games, you will start to see investment rise. And
given a sufficiently high enough rate of change (objectively
measured as increases in playing skill), you will start to see the
investments accelerate as competition will spur on more innovation
resulting in more successes resulting in more investment resulting
in further innovation...and a positive feedback loop will be boot
strapped. As the probability of producing profits rise, the risk
around insufficient returns on an investment fall. Eventually a
threshold is crossed and the system becomes self-generative.
Succinctly put - there is no money in computer Go (at least
compared to computer Chess) because there is currently no hope
(mathematically speaking) of the existing crop of computer Go
programs to scale up to anything less than moderate amateur
levels. Once this changes from no hope to a remote possibility,
the investment around Go will likely follow.
No to be too "Zen" here, but...the sooner you accept things as they
are and stop resisting "what is", the sooner you become free to
move forward. Go investment is working exactly as it ought, in
relation to the "whole".
Finally, thank you for your contribution to computer Go. I get
that it is an act of generosity (realistically, what else could it
possibly be). And I personally appreciate it.
Jim
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