I don't play go, so apply whatever discount seems appropriate.
Go is a zero sum game - except when humans are involved. People are clearly
dealing with a multi-criteria optimization task. Losses can be moral victories;
wins can be humiliating; style and tradition matter. Virtually every KGS
tournament has had a case where the author of a bot has said I don't want my
bot to win this game under these circumstances!
Go, as played by most people, can *almost* be described algorithmically. There
are variants of go that can be described algorithmically. And people can be
persuaded to play that way, albeit with much grumbling and quibbling. This can
lead some to assert that anything else doesn't exist. (Due to the influence of
Internet servers, maybe some day that will be true.) I won't generalize to
everyone, but my own work is focused on a mathematical abstraction of the game.
When I'm ignoring 3000 years of tradition, should I still call the game I'm
modeling go?
When a bot racks up a lot of wins against human players, through what they see
as gimmicks like winning by 1/2 point, you can explain that 2 ways. In a sense,
the humans are irrational, they play with pride and try to salvage their
dignity or grandstand: they are making emotional mistakes. Or... the bot is
maximizing a single criteria (winning percentage) at the expense of everything
else. It gets an artificially high rating by playing churlishly.
The friend, who first suckered me into trying my hand at computer go, once told
me: a game of go is like a conversation. I think that has meaning on many
levels. His immediate point was that playing a computer program felt like
arguing with a chat-bot.
Perhaps, at the current level of play, it doesn't matter. But when one of the
engines reaches shodan at 19x19 (not so far away, I think) , I wonder if it
should try to play the way people do. Or if maybe we should choose another name
for the game it's playing that doesn't have so much history.
Do strong chess programs pass turing tests? Should they?
- Dave Hillis
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