Don Dailey wrote: > Matthew Woodcraft wrote: >> Don Dailey wrote: >>> Much the same as in GO, where 10 -15 years ago the idea of Dan level >>> play was so far off it was considered completely unattainable by >>> pessimists, and even optimists viewed it as a century away.
>> Where did you get that impression? > You don't have to go back to the archives, I'll give you something that > you can find on the web right now that retains the old fashion thinking. > But first ... > I don't know what I was thinking when I said optimists felt it was 100 > years away. That certainly wouldn't make them optimists would it? In > fact that is how pessimists felt. I was probably typing this very > quickly and not proof-reading it before I sent it. > I easily found an article on the web that has the feel of the type of > pessimism I'm talking about. The author of this page sets up a straw > man, shoots it down, and indirectly implicates any approach that uses > look-ahead. Then in the final "Future Directions of Research" no type > of global search is even mentioned so the page is essentially out of > date. Certainly that page is out of date; clearly it was written before the monte-carlo programs raised their heads. But it really doesn't contain the kind of pessimism you described at all. In 'future directions' it explicitly contemplates that a very strong Go program will appear in the future. It doesn't say anything one way or another about how long we could expect it to take. > Of course hind-sight is 20/20. I don't fault people for making faulty > prognostications. I'm just trying to make the point that as a whole we > have been pretty short-sighted in thinking that global search of any > kind was out of the question. I'm entirely unconvinced that go programmers did rule out 'global search of any kind', as opposed to 'global search of the kind used in Chess programs'. That article says that the 'tried-and-true techniques applied to solving chess' won't work with go. But by that it explicitly means 'alpha-beta plus evaluation function', not 'any type of global search'. Well, as far as we know now the author was entirely right. The article goes on to describe how the current top programs are made up of heuristics and specialised programs, which also was doubtless entirely true when it was written. It doesn't say that the 'very strong Go program of the future' is expected to be written like this. They don't list 'different kinds of global search' in their future directions, but they don't say anything to disparage the idea either. And in any case, the question we're talking about is how long people expected it to take before we would see a dan-strength program, not what techniques they expected it to use. > I think it's rather dangerous to make wild claims, especially if you are > perceived as an expert in that area. I agree entirely. Which is why I questioned your statement about how people were thinking in the 1990s. -M- _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
