On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 11:01:52AM -0800, Christoph Birk wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Mar 2008, Don Dailey wrote:
>> My feeling is that in lost positions, the only thing we are trying to
>> accomplish is to make the moves more cosmetically appealing (normal) and
>> at best improve the programs chances of winning against weak players.
>> After all, if the program is in bad shape, then to be completely
>> realistic it's probably going to lose to the player that put it in this
>> bad shape.
>
> I think you are wrong here.
> If there are two lines of play from the viewpoint of the MC program:
> a) leads to a 0.5 pt loss
> b) may win if the opponent makes a stupid (!) mistake, but otherwise
> leads to a bigger loss.
>
> It is generally better to play for the 0.5 point loss as the oppoenent
> may make a end-game mistake and loses 1 point.
> But naive MC programs typically go for (b) which will lead to a
> devastating loss because the opponent usually does not make the 10 point
> mistake, but may have made the 1 point mistake.
I think there is one other important area of "virtual komi" usage that
has been neglected here - handicap games. Make your UCT bot play
with/against 6 handicaps, I think you are likely to see quite some early
second-line moves etc. With/against 9 handicap, you will see first-line
moves too! At least I see that with CzechBot MoGo instance. These are
obviously slow and/or nonsensical, and are created by I think the high
noise when all the winrates are within top/bottom 10%.
When playing against high handicap, the bot still can win a lot
because of its raw fighting power. But against stronger opponents, it
seems to me that it has a lot of trouble to properly handle its handicap
stones and will play some very slow moves that step by step throw away
the advantage gained by handicap stones. (Sorry, I have no raw numbers
here, though it should be possible to gather them from the KGS web.)
--
Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. -- J. W. von Goethe
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