David,
Very well said. Thank you.
Jim
David Doshay wrote:
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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