If I recall correctly, someone spoke of constraining the opening moves to the 3rd,4th,and 5th lines in the absence of nearby stones, or something to that effect. What was the impact of this experiment? I notice the recent discussion of the need for a lot of thinking time to find good opening moves; would this thinking time be reduced with a better-than-random selection of opening moves during the playouts? If fuseki and joseki databases were used to bias the playouts, would the speed and quality of opening play improve?
One concern about using expert knowledge of this sort - what happens when one's opponent plays "out of book?" Human players often find this frustrating - we sense that moves which deviate from joseki are wrong, but finding the correct refutation under time pressure is not always easy. To address this concern: at least one MC player uses an opening book; would it be profitable to automatically analyze past losses, and devote a few 100k playouts to look for better replies to plays which were favored by opponents in past games? This would be the analogue to advice often given to human players: study your own lost games; look for improvements. Unfortunately, an opening book does not generalize well; learning a better move for position Xi won't help with position Xj which differs by even one stone from Xi. What sort of move generators would cope with the vast number of similar positions? A single stone ( a ladder-breaker or a key point which makes or denies a second eye, for instance ) can make a large difference in the score, but one hopes that MC playouts would discover the negative consequences of moves which are "almost but not quite right." ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't pick lemons. See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos. http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html
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