Re: [computer-go] MC - Estimating a moves true probability of winning

2007-03-03 Thread Jason House
Jacques Basaldúa wrote: Hello, Just an explanation on something I may have explained badly. I see we agree in the fundamental. Correcting bias in that estimate should lead to better sampling. This is usually called continuity correction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_correction.

Re: [computer-go] MC - Estimating a moves true probability of winning

2007-03-02 Thread Jacques Basaldúa
Hello, Just an explanation on something I may have explained badly. I see we agree in the fundamental. Correcting bias in that estimate should lead to better sampling. This is usually called continuity correction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_correction. The estimator is not

Re: [computer-go] MC - Estimating a moves true probability of winning

2007-03-02 Thread steve uurtamo
Well, the assumption that p is estimated from the binomial because we are counting Bernoulli experiments of constant p is a mathematically sound method used universally. It does not require go knowledge, that's what i meant. When n is big enough, the binomial converges to the normal and

[computer-go] MC - Estimating a moves true probability of winning

2007-03-01 Thread Jacques Basaldúa
Hello Jason I think what you are trying to do can be done more easily. A. You have a Bernoulli random variable whose result is 0 or 1 following an unknown probability p. (Excuse me for explaining obvious things, this is for anyone who reads it.) You want to estimate p from a random sample. The

Re: [computer-go] MC - Estimating a moves true probability of winning

2007-03-01 Thread Jason House
I respond to various items below. Sections of the original e-mail that I'm not responding to were completely deleted. Jacques Basaldúa wrote: Hello Jason I think what you are trying to do can be done more easily. I guess the key question is what am I trying to do?. In UCT, the next move

[computer-go] MC - Estimating a moves true probability of winning

2007-02-28 Thread Jason House
Based on my analysis, estimating a moves probability of winning by taking the number of winning simulations (w) and dividing it by the total number of simulations (n) is actually biased. I tried to break this e-mail up into sections for easy digestion by the various people who might read

Re: [computer-go] MC - Estimating a moves true probability of winning

2007-02-28 Thread steve uurtamo
Maybe other simple solutions exist, you might want to check out those distributions that magically have nice properties with respect to the bayesian integral. they're called conjugate priors, and lots of distributions have nice, easy to calculate conjugate priors. there's a table here: