for what it's worth, strong players often spend enormous amounts of time on moves. professional tournament games are not generally of the 2-second-per-move variety. historically, they have taken days, but i'm not sure what the standard is now. perhaps someone who has seen a web simulcast of a recent tournament game can comment here.
keep in mind that lots of money is riding on the result of just a few games, and that these tournaments are played over weeks and weeks of time. look at the schedule for a professional go tournament sometime -- it's not a weekend affair. the reason that a pro would need at most 1s/move to beat the top go playing program is simply that any of his top 10 move choices will be vastly better than any of the computer's top 10 move choices with nonzero probability. that means that even if they overlap on the top move 90% of the time (and this is highly unlikely), any of the pro's top 10 move choices will be better the rest of the time, and this slight move/evaluation difference will magnify itself into huge board-changing trauma over the course of the game. if it takes a 9-stone stronger player < 100 moves to undo your 9-stone advantage in a correctly-handicapped game at <5s/move, how many moves at 1s/move do you think it would take a professional to undo your zero-stone advantage if you were a computer player? my guess is 3 or 4, since computers tend to choose fairly random opening moves from a small safe set, but without full-board knowledge. s. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never Miss an Email Stay connected with Yahoo! Mail on your mobile. Get started! http://mobile.yahoo.com/services?promote=mail _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
