On Sun, 2007-07-08 at 11:23 -0700, Brian Slesinsky wrote: > It seems to me that a domain where "everything is so amateuristic" has > its advantages, if you can only see them. Here is a field that is > small enough that most people know each other and anyone can > contribute with a certain amount of effort. These are the early days; > computer go's best years are surely yet to come. And yet it is not so > early that progress is slow and there is little hope. Isn't that > better than working in an area where everything has been done? > > I don't follow computer chess, but my naive outsider's perception is > that it is largely solved. Perhaps those who know more about it can > say more.
Chess is far from being solved. There is still a LOT of room at the top when one program can still dominate another. The current best chess program is significantly stronger than the second best and I think it likely that a perfect chess player would dominate this best program. It would rarely even have to suffer a draw against Rybka. Lots of room for improvement still. What is true is that the very best chess program are now better than people. This used to be considered the "gold standard", the ultimate but of course we now know that was foolish. I went over to GO for several reasons. I felt that computer chess had becomes heavily dominated by engineers. There is still some room for imagination, but not as much. It's mostly knowledge engineering, programming tricks and fine tuning. You still must come to every tournament with the fastest possible computer, preferably with multi-processors. Whereas GO is something altogether different. A UCT type breakthrough is probably not possible in Chess. Maybe some interesting good ideas are still left, but nothing dramatic. I left chess and leave it for the engineers to do their thing. The Go community is also far better behaved. A fight can still break out, but it's nothing like what happens in Chess, where there are decades long grudges and bitter wars of words. You cannot have an un-moderated chess group. Chrilly is certainly right about how Chess programmers perceive things. Although there is conservatism in every thing including computer chess, the Go community as a whole is rather old fashion and tends to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to any kind of progress. Almost like old men who think the way their grand-daddy did it is good enough for them. Most of us probably remember the heavy resistance to GTP, which in itself is inferior to UCI, the universal chess interface, which is the GO equivalent of GTP. However GTP was way better than what preceded it and yet even the top programmers believed GMP was sent by god and anything else was blasphemy. One surprise is that SGF was accepted by the go community. In some ways SGF is technically superior to PGN. However PGN is actually far more practical. The computer Chess community seems to value anything that is practical, the computer Go community seems to embrace anything that isn't. I think that's what Chrilly has noticed. Even things like time-control systems are very logical in Chess, but not in Go. The traditional ranking system of Go isn't very rational although it's understandable how it evolved. But the Chess community is usually very quick to discard the old if something more practical comes along. The Go community is far slower at embracing chess that is good. It may be that because GO is more of a right brained activity, it appeals more to the emotional, visual type of person. These kind of people are probably a bit more into the culture and history of a game than in the pure mathematical game itself. (There are also chess players who love the culture of chess more than the game itself.) Also, Chess has evolved more recently, there have been fundamental rule changes within the last 2 or 3 hundred years I believe. Somehow this has translated to a more conservative view of even computer chess and how it should be done. - Don > - Brian > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
