I just wanted to share my thinking about scaling.
Programs suffer from bugs, or certain weakness because they cannot
play the critical moves in the right order in some situations.
The debate has been to what degree this stops scaling against strong humans.
I would argue that bugs and weaknesses will not prevent scaling as
long as there is not a huge amount of serious bugs, such as always
playing suicidal moves in sekis during the playouts.
The reason that programs will scale (independent of the bugs and
weakness) for sure especially on large boards is that scaling will
affect every move played during a game.
If we look at a game where the program lost because of a semeai it is
true that there probably is a point where it is doomed no matter how
much computational time/cores we give it.
But in the next game, if it plays with more resources it will gain a
little on average for each move because it is stronger. And strength
in go not only about solving semeais and tricky tactics in multiple
locations on the board. It is also about playing vital point and
maximizing strength and weakness on the board. This is what MCTS
always did surprisingly well and this ability will always scale well
since it does not dependent on special tactical cases.
Sure strong humans may be able to make decisions where the board
slowly get harder and harder to analyze for the program. But as the
program scales up the search, it will also play better and better
moves preventing the human to have a choice in creating complications.
The board always start empty. There is always a risk that something
happens in the game that triggers a bug or a specific weakness. But I
think scaling will directly prevents these messy situation before they
occur. I think this is true even on 9x9 boards and more so for 19x19.
Best
Magnus
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