don, > But I also discovered that there seems to be no benefit whatsoever in > removing them from the play-outs. I have no real explanation for > this. But it does tell me that the play-outs are very different in > nature from the tree - you cannot just use the same algorithms for > selection and prioritizing moves.
did you use the same heuristic in the playouts when pruning them? i.e. that no other stones are anywhere nearby? in any particular playout, they may be the killing move for a group that ends up getting built near to the edge of the board, or a successful monkey jump. so removing them from somewhere deep in the tree as a rule would be bad, but if nothing is anywhere nearby, removing them as a first move choice is pretty reasonable. they make up a fairly small fraction of possible moves, and this is magnified the deeper you go into a search (so the net effect would be diminished, even with the heuristic). anything you can say about what not to do on the very first move of a search, if it applies to every board situation (ha ha ha) is great, though, if it's fast enough to check for. in fact, if *nothing* is *anywhere* nearby, a move on even the second line is bad. third or fourth is much better. s. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
