I suspect I am in your camp, Mark, though obviously it would be nice if we had measurements on this instead of conjectures.

I will offer some anecdotal evidence concerning humans playing other humans, from club and tournament playing experience: you will find that shorter time limits amplify the winning probability of stronger players when humans play other humans. Beating somebody 2 stones stronger than you on Blitz is much harder than beating them on a longer time limit; you may find that you need 3 handicap stones. The bigger the strength difference, the worse it gets. Beating a professional player in Blitz Go is *ferociously* difficult, even with very high handicap.

Humans are extremely good at recognizing patterns, whole board awareness, and intuition about influence; reading more into the game is useless for a human without these skills. It has never really surprised me that stronger players are that much better at short time limits, given their larger experience and knowledge. At the extreme end, you have the beginner: even if it's a human with incredible reading ability, he/she will still lose with a three hour time limit, to somebody a few stones stronger, and on a 10 minute limit.

Well, some trials with different time limits against computers would be nice, I guess :)

Christian


On 26/10/2009 23:14, Mark Boon wrote:
2009/10/26 Don Dailey<dailey....@gmail.com>:
Yes, you understood me right.   I disagree with Olivier on this one.    To
me it is self-evident that humans are more scalable than computers because
we have better heuristics.   When that is not true it is usually because the
task is trivial, not because it is hard.


Personally I rather think that what makes a human good at certain
tasks is not necessarily a conscious effort, and that doesn't have to
be a trivial task. So then actively thinking longer doesn't help as
much because you lack the control over the thought-process. I believe
very much that Go falls in that category, where Chess does not.

Mark
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