Hi Steve, steve uurtamo wrote: > If you're ahead and go for a bigger win, generally you're > just risking more to gain more when you don't need more. > > there is *absolutely* no advantage from a game-theoretical > point of view to try to win by more than 0.5 points. and in > practice, it's generally not a great idea to try to win by any > more than you absolutely have to. > > this goes toward the game-goal of the first person to really > explain the game to me, who said that both sides should > strive for a balanced game. a 0.5 pt. game is a perfectly > played game. which is not exactly the western view of > winning. > > and which, i agree, gives far too much credit to MC players, > since they roughly emulate this line of play "purely" by accident. > I don't agree with that. There is no accident here, MC really only cares about winning and has no ego about winning big. They don't go out of their way to win small either if that's what you mean. Unless you are saying that you should strive to go out of your way to win small so that the game is "balanced" then I don't know what you are talking about.
Because they are not perfect players they don't always do this perfectly, so you could say they are not "balanced" in this sense, but that applies to all imperfect players including the very best human players. They may strive to play balanced but they don't quite succeed either. > however, most people won't go so far as to ignore an unreasonable > invasion where you *let your opponent live inside your territory* > even if it wouldn't add up to enough to cause them to lose > the game. it's pride, or something. > > if you can prove* that you can stop an invasion with no > risk to yourself, people will generally play to stop it, but of course MC programs don't care. They might stop it by accident but not on purpose. Is this what you mean by unbalanced? Monte Carlo programs don't have a specific policy to lose stones on purpose just to keep the score "balanced" or close. They simply don't care either way. > although > to be fair, if you knew you didn't have to, by ignoring it you are > not treating it like a huge source of ko threats for your > opponent, which is a good thing. they might not really be > ko threats, if they don't add up to enough for you to lose if > you win the ko fight by ignoring them. which is part of the > tricky nature of a ko. measuring the size of the threat. > > one way that people will often play that i think has no basis > in an attempt to win, but which is simply human nature, is to > occasionally fight a ko fight to the bitter end regardless of whether > it will affect the outcome of the game. you'll see games that are > decided by 10-15 points with 30 moves worth of ko threats to > determine who gets the extra fraction of a point. > > this may be under the assumption that, "if i win the fight, i definitely > > won't lose the game, but if i lose the fight, maybe there's something > > that i didn't see that could cause me to lose the game" or it could > > just be kiai. but neither seem game-theoretically justifiable. > I agree. I think in some sense it dishonors players to do this. It's very "western" isn't it? I say that it dishonors a player to do this because the assumption is that it shows honor to give your very best effort to win (it would show disrespect to "throw" the game) but after having secured the win trying to do more is like "kicking a man when he is down", as if to humiliate him. > for some reason this gets great cheers from the audience, whereas > a computer player sacrificing 10 stones unnecessarily seems > horrifying. even with very, very good computer players, i think that > with sufficiently tight time controls we will always see this happen, > since it's an easy decision to make, and much better than losing on > time. > > s. > > *i.e. that any unconditionally alive group with a border of single-colored > stones should be able to prevent any freshly invading stones from living. > > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > 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/
