On 3/6/08, Christoph Birk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Don Dailey wrote: > > > advantageous to give away stones that not. Despite what many people > > believe, MC programs don't normally believe it's better to win small > > and they are not hell-bent on giving away stones in order to try to make > > the score come out to be exactly 0.5 win. > > > You are correct that it is not explicitly programmed into the MC > programs to win by 0.5 pts, but since most of them don't care about > the margin they in practice often do.
You are right, but I think that you may also be misconstruing the nakade problem as a lack of concern about margin, when it is really a fundamental failure to understand (i.e., failure to explore sufficiently) the nakade shapes. The tendancy for your final scores on lost games to be 0.5 really reflects a motivation on your own part to lose by the smallest margin that you can. After a point when the game is resolved, this doesn't conflict with the program's goal, so it lets you do just that. As an interesting thought, I think that it might actually be informative for people to try out programs that _do_ try to win by exactly 0.5! Not as a fundamental goal, but rather as a slight preference for the endgame. If authors can do this in a manner that does not degrade the playing ability much, then human players might be able to see even more clearly what life & death errors a program makes, and at what point it is able to discover the correct solution. Clearly the programs would be weaker like this, but I think it could expose some systematic problems very quickly, so that they could be focused on. Weston _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
