On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Matthew Woodcraft <[email protected]>wrote:
> Don Dailey wrote: > > > It converges at perfect play. Thinking that it just happens to > > converge at the exact limits of current hardware is sort of like > > thinking the earth is the center of the universe just because this is > > where we happen to be right now. In 20 years with hardware 100x faster > > or more (assuming that happens) I'm sure people will also be saying > > that we have reached convergence. I saw this happen over a period of > > about 20 years in computer chess, it was always the same, computers > > have pretty much reached their limit and we need to try something > > else. Eventually people wised up, but it took a while. Now it starts > > all over again with Go. > > There is a very big difference between saying "Computers have pretty > much reached their limit" and saying that a particular implementation > (with particular tuning parameters) doesn't get significantly stronger > when given more time. > There is some truth in that. It's possible that Zen is tuned up to play really well at this time control but did one or more things that also make it not possible to play much better no matter how much extra time it has. But that seems like a real stretch to me. It's not hard to believe it's fairly optimal at this level however, but that should not have a major impact on it's scalability. The type of thing that might make it not scalable is the decisions to forward prune certain moves in the tree with no further consideration EVER. So if something like that is happening then it's basically an incorrect program and it's just not scalable and every time computers get a little fast the authors will have to tune it to play at the new time control in a non-scalable way. In my really weak early go program I found a big gain by veto'ing lot's a moves (in the tree portion of the search.) I did not give them low consideration, I gave them NO consideration. It worked great until the program got stronger. Once it was stronger it still could never play great moves that involved breaking these rules. So it could not scale. Of course I knew this was a problem and eventually removed these rules. One of them was to never move to the edge of the board unless you were within 2 or 3 stones of something else. Don't remember the exact rule but it turns out that is a pretty good rule and helps a really weak program avoid a lot of stupid moves which slow it down, but it can sometimes be dead wrong. > > -M- > _______________________________________________ > Computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go >
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