Maybe I should ask first, for clarity sake, is MCTS performance in
handicap games currently a problem?
Mark
Yes, it's a big problem. And thats not a matter of opinion.
MC bots, leading a game by a large margin, will give away their advantage
lighly except for the last half point.
Even on a 9*9 board, even if the bot wins more games on even with 7.5 komi,
that doesn't mean that it's impossible
for the human to win, giving a 2 stone handicap. All it needs is a single
bot missjudgement after the game got close.
Granted, bots are really excellent at defending the last half point
advantage tooth and claw. I'm just saying that it should
be impossible for the human to win on 2 stones, and it isn't.
If they are behind by a large margin they will play either random or ko
threat type moves.
So there is a kind of symmetry here. Beeing too far ahead or behind ruins
the bots plays.
The biggest practical problem right now is poor play against pros on a 19*19
board, taking a large handicap.
Special fuseki patterns are only a patch. When, after a decent opening, the
regular patterns take over, they usually immediately
start to work against the bots own previous moves.
Looking into the horses mouth, instead of invoking Aristotle, is really the
only way to find out.
I had hoped that programmers would find the idea interesting enough to try
it out.
Instead, I found myself in a hand waving contest. Granted, I started it, so
I can't complain.
Thanks to Ingo for simulating dynamic komi by hand to give programmers
something less speculative.
Btw, I played 2 games (as gogonuts) on KGS against goIngo(really ManyFaces).
I won both on 5 stones. But in the first one, with komi adjusted by Ingo, I
had to make a very critical invasion that should not really have worked. In
the second game I won without problems.
At the time, Ingo adjusted the win rate for w to 50%.
Since then, with his limited trials, Ingo found out that adjusting the komi
to give each side a 50% win rate isn't optimal. His current rule is to
adjust to 42% for w. This is ofcourse only a crude start, but sophistication
can only be introduced by programmers.
Stefan
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