On 7/10/07, Chris Fant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Nonetheless, a program that could not only play a decent game of go, but
> somehow emulate the _style_ of a given professional would be of interest,
> would it not?
Is this the case in chess? If so, I've never heard of it.
I don't think that it is (but I don't know much about computer chess).
For a machine to learn the _style_ of anything whatsoever, by my reckoning,
is a rather difficult task.
As an example, I was once privileged to attend a talk by Donald Knuth in which
he described a somewhat difficult task that he was working on, and challenged
us to think about, namely, to teach a machine to recognize the _style_ of some
arbitrary font.
Far more difficult than mere OCR (optical character recognition), wherein one
already possesses the entire set of alphanumeric characters and symbols of a
particular font, this task was something like the following:
Given only an uppercase 'B', the numeral '4', and a lowercase 'a':
Reproduce the entire font.
As you might well imagine, doing that could prove a bit trickier than OCR.
It's almost akin to reading the mind of a calligrapher: What strokes would be
used to create a '7', an 'f', or an ampersand ('&'), given that we know only
the three characters above? At what point do we think we have the right answer
to such questions? If we think that we are finished, and then compare the font
that font we have created against the actual font, then have we failed if it
turns out that there are differences? That is, to what degree must our created
font match _exactly_ the actual font? Pixel for pixel? Or is there a degree
of leeway, within which we may be satisfied that we have "succeeded"?
In a similar way, being able to recognize the _style_ of some particular pro
go player is a bit trickier than merely creating a program that plays.
It's a different problem altogether.
Just as Knuth's problem is harder than OCR, so too is capturing a pro's style
a greater challenge than creating a "go program".
[Disclaimer: I've forgotten the exact details of Knuth's challenge. He had
determined that there were three or four characters that had the necessary
and sufficient details (loops, serifs, horizontals, verticals, diagonals, etc.)
to permit recreating the entire font, for most fonts anyway. I don't remember
which characters, nor how many, although I'm sure it was either three or four.]
--
Rich
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