Hi, Don
I can find arguments to disagree. I think what makes humans "homo
sapiens" is reasoning, not the ability to compute numerical simulations.
As a human (I am one) I feel disappointed when the explanation I get for
a best move is "after x millions of simulated matches it proved to be
the best". If it is well done, I believe it, but I don't like it because
I cannot verify it by myself. Such a program will not improve my play
because it will not tell me what I do wrong or how I can improve. As
a user, I would rather pay for a program that makes me improve my play
than for the best program that only tells me moves are "simulation gospel".
On the other hand, I can imagine an old go sensei (I have never met
one, I imagine him from Kawabata's novel) like a virtuous piano player,
imagine Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli or Tete Montoliú (I met him). These
men had their brains and even their bodies transformed by a whole life
of study and improvement towards perfection. What they finally gained was
_gesture_. The way they put their hands on a piano keyboard or the way
they read a go board was the result of a lifetime of training. What you
call "a dirty hack", patterns deeply implemented in their brains.
Gesture is what I expect from my programs. And a lifetime of training
may be 100 hours of computing. I call it "jeito". It sounds Japanese,
that is appropriate for go. Here, in the Canary Islands, the word
is used in the sense of a "skillful trick" and most people believe
it is a Canarian word. The truth is it is a Portuguese word and it
means gesture.
Of course, this is just chatting. At the end the strongest program
decides who is right and who is wrong. ;-)
Jacques.
Don Dailey wrote:
What really irks me is that in most peoples minds, that is considered
the "elegant" approach - hard coding tons of fixed "knowledge" into the
program. Nothing could be farther from the truth, this is a dirty
shortcut, a hack. There is nothing elegant whatsoever about having a
huge database of patterns that tell the program what and what not to do
- then calling it "smart."
The reason UCT/MC is elegant is that it has a built in mechanism to
discover truth for itself. It may not be the best way and perhaps
there is something better but at least it is a try. In a lot of ways
it mimics the human thinking process. The MC play-outs is a crude
substitute for human experience (the experience is gained on the fly)
and UCT tree is a substitute for reasoning about characteristics of the
position, what does and doesn't work.
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