On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 07:25:00PM -0800, David Fotland wrote: > Japanese rules. I know people on this list don't like them, but the game > plays out almost the same as with Chinese rules, but since there is a one > point penalty for playing inside your own territory, the game ends much > earlier.
I really don't like Japanese rules for automated servers, and don't even much like them for serious computer tournaments, because they seem to have corner cases which are tricky even for humans, while TT playout could probably be defined on a napkin. The interaction of perverse playouts with netlag does sound really irritating, though, enough that I'd tentatively support complicating the playout rules to support it --- if not necessarily for occasional high-visibility computer tournaments between highly competent programs played on LANs with negligible lag, at least for thousands-of-games open-to-all Internet ladder servers. For such open-to-all servers, I think it'd be reasonable to use something like Robert Jasiek's proposal of a hard cutoff at some large number of moves --- perhaps two or three times the number of squares on the board. That'd be a slightly inelegant gratuitous addition to the ruleset, but one with an invisibly small effect on well-played games and the advantage of eliminating the visible practical problem of unbounded netlag in poorly-played games. (At least I assume it'd be invisible: as far as I know there is no evidence that this would have a significant effect on even one in a million reasonably-well-played games. If some future breakthrough in strategy causes ultra-long games to become more common, I'd want the now-irritatingly-visible cutoff to be removed.) Another possibility might be putting a cutoff on some other quantity that an automated server can easily measure which is small in a well-played game, but which is chosen for rapid growth in the kinds of perverse playouts which are causing problems in practice. For example, perhaps something like MY_STONES plus the product of MY_NET_PASSES and HIS_SQUARED_POSTPASS_SACRIFICES. MY_STONES is the number of my stones remaining on the board. MY_NET_PASSES is the difference between the number of times I have passed and the number of times my opponent has passed, or zero if that difference would be negative. HIS_SQUARED_POSTPASS_SACRIFICES is the sum of squares of sizes of groups which my opponent created after my pass(es) and which then got captured. I'll be mildly surprised (because of worries about perverse seki situations and such) if this particular quantity is robust enough to serve as a really good cutoff (as in "if MY_STONES + MY_NET_PASSES * HIS_SQUARED_POSTPASS_SACRIFICES exceeds the number of squares on the board, the game is won"). However, it won't surprise me if something in a similar spirit turns out to be usefully robust. -- William Harold Newman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C Of course one could write a computer program to converse like Disraeli or Churchill, by simply storing every possible quip and counterquip. But that's the sort of overfitting up with which we must not put! -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.5.html _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
