On Dec 11, 2007 8:53 PM, Don Dailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The play-out portion is a crude approximation for imagination. We > basically look at a board and imagine the final position. The MC > play-outs kill the dead groups in a reasonably accurate (but fuzzy) way > and put the flesh on the skeleton. Near the end of the game, the > play-outs end mostly the same the way the game itself would end - and > the same way a human would expect it to look like.
This seems pretty fishy to me, given that MC can't read ladders accurately, for instance, but any competent human can, and that MC plays so bizarrely differently from humans in many positions, especially endgames. There may be strong theoretical arguments why MC is STRONG, and there are clearly empirical demonstrations that MC IS strong, but it is not at all clear that MC is somehow simulating/approximating the mental process of a human player playing the game. If it were, I would expect an MC player to make moves that look a lot more human. > I attribute the success of MC to the fact that it's the best simulation > of how WE do it. The other approaches are clearly more synthetic, > including raw MC without a proper tree. But those synthetic approaches seem MORE like what many human players do (at least humans I've talked to), thinking discretely about different domain-specific concrete things like "are there any appropriate josekis for this situation?", "can I kill that group? what is its final internal eye shape going to look like?", "are any of my groups endangered?", "is my opponent's moyo invadable? or reducible?", "does this ladder work?", "can these 2 groups be separated?", "can I make these stones live? can I do it in sente?", "who has more ko threats now?", "how big is that ko threat compared to the value of this ko?", "where is the biggest endgame move right now?", "where is the biggest sente endgame move right now?", "which of these monkey jumps is bigger?", etc. At a literal detailed analysis level, MC is totally different from how we do it. I know of no human player who imagines the 2 players randomly dropping stones over and over to see what proportion of wins/losses results. The basic "philosophy" of MC is radically different from how humans think about the game. (Which is not to say that MC is a bad approach of course.) And at a higher level (in terms of the actual moves that actually get chosen by MC), they also look very bizarre compared to a human player, particularly in the end game where (as has been discussed a lot recently) a winning MC often fills its own territory or plays neutral points when real points still exist, something a better-than-beginner (to say nothing of strong) human player would never do. In the opening, strong humans typically are familiar with many joseki, which MC is much less likely to randomly follow. And (to mention the actual subject of this thread...) a competent human player can read out most ladders correctly with certainty, unlike MC. and so on... cheers, russ _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
