Of course everyone will see this differently. For me the fundamental difference between 9x9 and 19x19 is obvious. People play 19x19 seriously and have for at least 2000 years. A commercial program has to play 19x19 well, and has to play by Japanese rules. It has to be enjoyable to play against.
You are absolutely right that 9x9 go and CGOS has made a huge contribution to computer go by stimulating interest until the new algorithms surpassed the old style of program. I'll admit that I was skeptical that monte carlo would scale to 19x19, and clearly I was wrong. Maybe I misremember the early debates, but I think the argument from the UCT/MC side was that fast pure-random playouts were scalable and would do well on 19x19. The pure random playouts got quite strong at 9x9, and there was much discussion about how to make playouts faster, how to implement fast pseudo-liberties, etc. When I was skeptical that this pure random approach would scale to 19x19, I was correct. So I think it is true that the early algorithms did not scale, and 19x19 required something new (patterns and local sequences). David > > Pretend?? So where lies the fundamental divide between 19x19 and 9x9? > If anything, in the last couple of years most of the progress in > Computer Go came from 9x9. > Some dinosaurs claimed it wouldn't scale up because it was a > completely different game... > E. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
