On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 09:30 +0100, Sylvain Gelly wrote: > So GnuGo and commercial programs have been optimized to play strong in > very few time. For them, long thinking time is simply not relevant. It > is not the same goal.
Hi Sylvain, What I'm saying is that the programmers don't realize their real goal is to make it play better with less time. They THINK their goal is to make it play pretty good in about 10 seconds or whatever their goal is. But the 2 things are conceptually the same due to Moores law. You know this is true because just take a commercial program written 10 years ago. It makes it's moves quickly playing on an ancient piece of hardware with hardly any memory. So those guys kept expanding their program to use more time. It's only semantics whether you say they were trying to make it play better faster, or better in the same amount of time. But they stumbled around a lot because they were not thinking in a scientifically logical way. They only thought in absolute terms - I have 10 seconds per move, what can I do? Obviously, they wanted to play as strong as they could in those 10 seconds. The goal of scalability is the same thing that has always been done, it's just a more intelligent and methodical way to think about the problem. What makes me laugh is that some programmers imagine it has never been about time - just strength as though it is a totally unrelated concept. You scalability experiments with Mogo shows what should be painfully obvious - it's all about what you can do in a given amount of time and it should be no surprise that you can do more with more time. I agree that Gnugo was written in an absolute non-scalable style. Why Gnugo does is continually upgrade from year to year. They are making their program scale in a painfully manual way. - Don _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
