----- Original Message -----
From: "steve uurtamo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "computer-go" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 7:29 PM
Subject: Re: [computer-go] U. of Alberta bots vs. the Poker pros
i think that you might be confusing two important things:
i) the difficulty of a problem.
ii) the amount and kind of effort that has gone toward solving a problem.
No, not at all. But my point is: For progress in any field the difficulty of
a problem is less important than the urgency/interest of society to solve
it. Science and technology is not driven by the internal logic of the
science, but by the interest of the society.
Once there is a very high social demand, there is big progress in a field.
There is the proverb "war is the mother of all things". A lot of innovations
are made related to war. In times of war the social urgency is highest and
costs do not matter. E.g. the atomic bomb was build within a short time,
jet-propulsion, computers were developed ......
In medicine progress is made, if it is a rich-mans sickness, and almost no
progress is made if its a poor-mans fate. E.g. There is considerable
advancement in AIDS-medicine, because it was at least initially a rich-mans
sickness, there is almost no progress in Lepra. This can not be explained by
the intrinsic difficulties of the deseases.
It is also quite a hard problem to generate realistic 3D effects in
real-time. There is high social interest (the kids have enough money), so
one develops special purpose massive parallel hardware like the latest
graphics cards or the Cell processor. The action players and not anymore the
D.O.D. are nowadays the driving force behind hardware-development. If there
would be the same interest for Go, one could develop special purpose
Go-Hardware with an impressive speedup. But Go is like Lepra.
Chrilly
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