Don Dailey wrote: > Are you trying to say that heavy playouts are better? > Who is going to argue with that? I agree completely. > Are you trying to make the point that there are very simple > to understand positions that computers cannot easily solve? > I agree with that. Are you trying to say that heavy playouts > can solve many types of common positions orders or magnitude > faster than light playouts? I agree with that. > Are you trying to say uniformly random playouts suck? > I agree with that.
I do not pretend to argue. Just to clarify ideas and read what others have to say. And of course I agree on all that. In self play all MCTS programs scale. Everybody agrees and it has been tested empirically. Intuitively: If we admit that 2000 sims is better than 1000, since nodes in the tree are trees themselves, it is clear that no matter how many million simulations we play, there will always be nodes with 1000 visits and they would be better evaluated if they had 2000. The entire tree relies on the correct evaluation at the nodes so the entire tree benefits of more sims. A different question is: Can a really weak program, say vanilla MCTS with uniform random playouts, just no eye filling (no RAVE, no progressive widening) reach the strength of, say Aya, with 2500 sims (KGS 4 kyu) in 19x19 ? The answer is: Theoretically: Yes. In practice: No. Not with a trillion sims per move. You probably don't disagree since that is implicit in "heavy playouts can solve many types of common positions orders or magnitude faster than light playouts". Note that this question is equivalent to: Would the current version of Zen become a pro just with hardware evolution? Jacques. _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
