> The handicap system is imperfect anyway, it's almost > a coincidence that it works as well as it does.
okay, this sounds like chess bias. the handicap system *defines* the difference in skill levels in go. it's a coincidence that something like ELO can match fairly well to stones. not the other way around. the fact that chess doesn't have a fine-grained way to handicap a game, in fact, the fact that most games don't, doesn't mean that it's hard to deal with. my guess is that any go playing program that doesn't depend upon an opening book for a lot of its strength is going to adapt just fine. experiments between players of different CGOS-measured strengths could find this out for sure -- time for another set of experiments? i'll donate some cpu time. if it helps to encourage the authors, just keep in mind that winning with handicap is extremely convincing evidence to "regular go players" that one player is much stronger than another. plus, it takes exponentially fewer games to determine that difference. with a logarithmic (in range of handicap, say, +/-6 stones) number of games you could get a very accurate view of the strength difference between two players. say, take best of 2 out of 3 at each test level and do binary search. some go clubs just keep track of the relative difference in stone strength between pairs of players, requiring, say, a 3-win streak by one player to adjust the handicap by a single stone. alternatively, you can (somewhat cheesily) map ELO to handicap and vice-versa for a limited range of ELO and handicap. s. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
