Hello, > It looks to me that the strength of the top programs, like Mogo, is mostly > due to the new UCT search algorithm.
It depends what you compare to. If you compare UCT against no tree, this makes a lot of difference. If you compare UCT to former Remi Coulom's tree search algorithm, Remi can answer better than me. He posted a message some months ago, and (if I remember well) his experiments showed an improvement like 5-10% against gnugo comparing to his previous tree search algorithm (which was already an improvement over other tree search algorithms). If you compare uniform-MC/UCT against top programs in 9x9, the difference is huge. MoGo was using UCT since its first version on CGOS and was ranked at 1650. So with UCT and uniform MC you are very far from the top. UCT alone is far to be enough. > I wonder what would happen if we took a tradional strong computer-go > evaluation function and combined it with UCT? This should be an interesting experiment. My bet is that it should not change a lot the strength. May be this can be worst than alpha-beta. Perhaps the gnugo team already tried? UCT has its advantages and drawbacks, and I think its performance against alpha-beta depends on the evaluation function. UCT is efficient for MC evaluation function. It is not obvious it is efficient with "traditional" evaluation function. I would be very happy to know the result. Sylvain _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
