On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:34 PM, steve uurtamo <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Why are you comparing humans to computers? It's ridiculous to measure >> progress by comparing to the top human players. What we care about is how >> much progress we can make from year to year. >> > > i think that the use of the word "ridiculous" might be a bit strong. > measuring against humans is only silly once you've crushed them and can > easily crush them at will. for instance, if we developed robots to do the > running long jump, and it turned out that they could only jump 5 feet, a > natural and exciting milestone would be when they could reach nearly as far > as average humans, then as far as the best humans. once they could jump 5 > times as far as the best of us ever could, there'd be no more need to > compare them to humans anymore because nobody would have much interest in > human-robot competitions. > > so if you set out to design a computer chess program back at the dawn of > computers with the sole goal to make a computer chess program which could > beat all other computer chess programs, and you never once stopped to > compare it against human play, it would seem a little strange. especially > since you were teaching a computer to play a game that humans invented, with > human rules. computers probably wouldn't invent chess as their own favorite > game to play if we left them to their own devices, right? so it's not all > that unnatural. > > it's also a real-world metric that the layman can get his hands on. > It's a natural metric to use, I agree with you on this. But I just want to remind everyone that how humans play chess and how they play go are different. They are different games and humans don't play either game "well" if I choose perfect play as my yardstick. I think my real point is that we should be moving ahead and making progress. How quickly we do that is the only important thing. Some people I have heard race turtles. Turtles are slow. Nobody complains that they do not keep up with rocket ships, that would be silly. We accept them for what they are, very slow moving creatures. If one turtle is 2x faster than another, they probably view that as amazing I am sure. Even though a slow man is many times faster. At this point in time that should be how we think of GO. It's still too early to have these ridiculous stone handicap matches with mid level pros just to pretend our programs can compete with strong players. > > Here is how we can judge our progress. Go back 30 years and get the best >> go program available and compare it to the best GO program of today. Play >> 1000 games and tell us what the score is. Then let's have a discussion on >> whether we are making progress or not. >> > > i'm pretty sure that we have made progress, and a lot of it. but go is > simply a slightly more complicated game to analyze. not to compare against > previous go-playing programs, but to analyze as a game. that was really the > only point i was trying to make in my original posting. the reason computer > programs aren't currently crushing humans by some simple adaptation of > chess-playing programs, for instance, is because it is seemingly a more > difficult game to make computers good at. not because it is some totally > different game that the best people didn't bother to write code for just > yet. i say seemingly, but i really mean that combinatorially, it's larger, > and there doesn't appear to be any major collapsing of the game tree that > immediately reduces it to a simpler game to analyze. > It's definitely a LARGER game combinatorially. Is that your metric for how hard it is? Just use a small board if that is important to you. > > I think what is happening here is that we are so shortsighted we don't look >> more than 2 weeks ago and think that is representative of what is actually >> going on. In Dave's case we took a look 40 years ago and forgot to look >> again. >> > > i think we are running the risk of drifting from the original question, > grinding axes and getting on soapboxes. > I tend to react when I hear cliches repeated over and over without thought. > > s. > > _______________________________________________ > Computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go >
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