Although what Don writes is all correct, I understood the question to
be rather different. It's not a matter of being able to determine the
right score at the end or the right way to play, it's a matter of
determining the right score after each playout. For performance
reasons MC programs will cut corners there which could be taken
advantage of when playing by Japanese rules because the after the
playout it is prone to getting the wrong score in certain situations.
Mark
On 6-nov-08, at 12:12, Don Dailey wrote:
On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 09:19 +0100, "Ingo Althöfer" wrote:
Hello all, two questions.
(i) Do there exist strong 9x9-go programs on Monte-Carlo base
for Japanese rules?
(ii) Having available only programs for Chinese rules, but playing
in a tournament with Japanese rules, which special tricks and
settings should be used to maximise winning chances? (This is meant
especially in the light of MC's tendency to win games by 0.5
points according to the rules implemented.)
I've thought about those questions myself from time to time. Let me
think out loud concerning this. I am by know means an expert in
Japanese scoring or even GO in general, so I'm just giving some
thoughts
here and a plan for building a Japanese "simple" bot that you can be
free to criticize:
It seems to me the primary difference between the two is knowing
when to
stop playing and of course scoring dead groups. The Chinese style
bots
do not technically need to know about scoring.
You can look at the combined statistics at the end of the games for a
given point to get a sense of whether that point is still in play or
whether it's a forgone conclusion. You can do the same to determine
dead groups. I don't know how well that works in all cases, but I
have
used it and it works pretty well.
But we also want to recognize dame, and not play to dame points early
in the game even if it doesn't affect the final Chinese outcome. So
here is my idea:
1. If ALL the stones of a particular group belong to the opponent
with
high certainty, they are dead.
2. If there are open spaces that belong to you or the opponent with
high certainty don't move to them.
3. If an uncertain point is touching stones of both colors and both
colors have high certainty for the color they belong to, it is
probably
dame and you shouldn't move to them.
example: White has a stone on d4 that is clearly alive.
Black has a stone on f4 that is clearly alive.
An empty point on e4 is highly uncertain.
Do not play to e4 - it is probably dame.
question: Is that a reasonably good rule or does it need some
work?
4. If you have no moves other than these cases, you should pass.
You can test this idea by playing a bot on KGS under Japanese rules.
You may have to tweak what you consider your uncertainty margin.
Also,
I'm not considering seki here but we would want to find a way to cope
with that.
- Don
Ingo.
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