Hello, some piece of information for those who are interested in a strange branch in the history of Monte Carlo game tree search.
I found some very nice work by people in "theoretical" combinatorics. It seems that the starting point was a paper by Chvatal and Erdoes in 1978: Biased positional games, Annals of Discrete Math. 2 (1978), 221–228. Jozsef Beck went forward in their direction, and coined the term "probabilistic intuition" in a paper from 1993. What he meant by "Probabilistic intuition" is well described in another paper by him from 1998: J. Beck, Foundations of Positional Games, Random Structures and Algorithms, 9 (1996), 15–47. On bottom of p.15 Beck writes: "... in many complicated games, the outcome between two perfect palyers is the same as the 'majority outcome' between two 'random players' (random game)." Built on his work is for instance a paper from 2009 by Gebauer and Szabo http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/gebauerh/Connectivity.pdf where also the new name "random graph intuition" instead of "probabilistic intuition" is introduced. To state it clearly: Very likely these results will not help in search for a perfect Monte-Carlo go player. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that "pure theory in combinatorics" found such a way to classify some deep games by means of Monte-Carlo. Ingo. _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
