Don,
This has taken me some time to formulate an answer. Mainly because
you are making so many assumption about what I understand or imagine
and what not. It makes for a confused discussion and I didn't feel
like getting into arguments like "no, that's not what I meant etc."
Let me therefore change the discussion a bit to see if this will make
things more clear. Consider a chess-playing program with an
unorthodox search method. When playing a human after while it
announces check-mate in thirty-four moves. Yet the human can clearly
see it's check-mate in four. Ah, one could say, but the computer is
100% confident winning either way so it doesn't care which one it
chooses. It doesn't matter whether a human thinks mate in four is
more beautiful.
Now it so happens that with chess we're pretty confident that when a
chess-program announces check-mate that it is in fact correct. But
what if there could be a sliver of doubt? Maybe the program has no
doubt, but the programmer might. Bugs happen. Wouldn't you say it's
better to choose the shorter mate sequence? Regardless of whether
humans may find it more beautiful?
It's with this example in mind when I say winning with more points is
better. A MC Go program may show 100% confidence in winning, but all
that means is that all playouts ended up with a win. But we know that
it could still be wrong, and with a much higher likelyhood than the
chess program described above.
Maybe you're right and a bigger win should only be favoured if the MC
playouts show the same probability of winning. It seems to me the
most conservative approach that should be followed at least. Somehow
I feel there's a bit more to be gained though by giving the size of
the win slightly more weight than that. But I'm also willing to
accept that that may just be an illusion.
Mark
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
