Ladders are not hard, especially if one is permitted to place stones on the
(virtual) board to trace the flow. A 20 kyu human can follow the logic.
Don, you describe some subtle choices of playing one's opponent, and compare
them to MC programs, but you are a fairly strong chess player. If you were
counseling a beginner, you'd surely urge him/her to focus on getting the basics
right before getting fancy with estimations of winning probability vis a vis
particular opponents.
Go and chess differ in a fundamental way. With chess, many positions may be
genuinely unknowable, beyond human/machine ability to measure the exact
outcome; a probabilistic approach may be well suited to such situations. With
Go, there are many situations which can be read out precisely, provided that
one has the proper tools - ladders, the ability to distinguish between one and
two eyes; the ability to reduce eyespaces to a single eye with an appropriate
placement; and so forth. Failure to recognize such situations is like failing
to spot a pinned piece or a passed pawn.
Every now and then, I have the opportunity to play a pro, or watch a pro
against other amateur players. Even 4 and 5 dan amateurs find their groups
crumbling against pro players. But in many cases, the pro simply exploits weak
shape - reducing groups to the "one eyed state."
Evaluating winning odds depends upon evaluating the final score at the leaf
nodes, which depends on being able to distinguish between one and two eyes, to
count liberties in capturing races, to recognize seki, to read ladders, and
other basic skills. At some point in the game, an evaluation function should
be able to quickly and accurately report "oops, just lost ten or twenty points,
with no compensating gain, therefore the score is -15; this node should be
reported as a lost game, back up and try something different." The earlier one
can make such accurate assessments, the better one's game.
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