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 ________________________________________________________________________ Check Out the new free AIM(R) Mail -- 2 GB of storage and industry-leading spam and email virus protection.
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