On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Don Dailey <[email protected]> wrote: > How can I dispute it, you do not define terms? Break it down, when you > say "Go is much harder than Chess" what does that even mean? 13 is much > harder than 27. What does that supposed to mean? Dogs are harder than > Cats. If it means it's harder to write a go program, then I completely > dispute it - I can write a go program much faster than a chess program. > Both program will play very well if I define "very well" to be random play. > My point is that hard or easy is an arbitrary concept and I don't believe > there is any reason to believe that how humans play is some kind of sacred > yardstick. If you make that the yardstick, then GO comes up short.
I agree that people are often lacking in defining precise terms. But it's also possible to be unreasonably dense by ignoring some basic assumptions that many, if not most, take for granted. Doing so deliberately doesn't help the discussion of course. Would you agree with a slightly more precise statement: Go is harder to program to match a human expert than chess. It almost doesn't matter how you define expert. But let's say something like the top 1% of players or the top 1000 players of the world. As long as you use the same criteria for chess experts and Go experts. I have yet to hear about a better yardstick, either from you or anybody else. Not surprisingly, because apart from computers and humans I don't know of anything else that we could use. And to compare computers to computers is obviously meaningless in any absolute measuring sense. So measuring humans versus computers is the logical choice to start with. And possibly the only one until you have some other point of reference, like a perfect player. But only if you can prove that progress is smooth and not too jumpy. For example: if you have a perfect player and the 'almost perfect' player A can never win more than 10% against the perfect player without being perfect itself. But maybe you can have another 'almost perfect player' B that also wins 10% (or less) against a perfect player but wins 70% against A. We already see this happening where difference in level of a group of different MCTS programs does not translate to the same difference against humans, or even a different set of of programs. Maybe some day computers will learn to program. And who knows they'll find it easier to program Go than chess. Somehow I'm doubtful, but until we have more evidence about this it's fair to use the evidence we currently have at hand. Mark _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
