On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 06:39:17PM -0500, Chris Fant wrote: > > I propose a far more powerful and correct set of rules: > 1. Play the move that gives you the best chance of winning.
That would be lovely - if we had a good way of estimating those chances. It is (should be) well known that MC playouts are not perfect. They seem to be good enough to use as an evaluation function in a tree search, but if you look at programs that uses only MC evaluation, you can see that they don't play very strong. There are some things MC just can not see. It only sees groups as unconditionally alive if they have two separate eyes, not if it has one large eye - no matter if that is clearly alive (say five points in a row). It sees a definite risk of getting cut through a bamboo joint. All this comes naturally from playing random moves, and not reacting to forcing moves that for us humans look all too obvious. Having said that, I am not trying to rake down MC techniques. In fact, I am writing my own MC-based program (although I am too short of time to see any real progress. Don't expect anything new on cgos the next few months!). I have some ideas I want to explore, maybe I am lucky and one of them turns out to be useful. - Heikki -- Heikki Levanto "In Murphy We Turst" heikki (at) lsd (dot) dk _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
