dfan wrote:
Drew wrote:
Those of you who own CS, could you please share some feedback regarding what features you think it should have but lacks?
The short version is that it should be easy to use Crazy Stone as a tool to analyze games, and it currently isn't. The raw materials are mostly there, but the UI is often actively hostile to the process. For example, here is how I analyze a different move in ChessBase:
and here is how I do it in Crazy Stone:
- Click on the board window to bring it into focus
- Click again on the point I want to play
- Dialog comes up asking if I want to continue, click Yes
- Dialog comes up asking if I want to branch, click Yes
- Now I have left analysis mode, so select Analyze / Analyze Current Game to go back into it.
That's literally five times as many actions.
Spock would say: That is highly illogical.
So... you can't just put CrazyStone into "Analysis Mode", where it just keeps running in the background, providing the best found variation? And then, when you click a button, add that variation to the game tree?
Chessbase and it's assorted programs such as Fritz have been able to do something like that one way or another for 20 years now. I understand that for Go, it wasn't really useful, as 10 years ago, the strongest program would play around 6k or so. Anyone with a bit of drive and effort can reach 6k, I think; at least, I feel that this is somewhere around intermediate club level strength, comparable to a 1500-1600 ELO-rating or so in Chess. (
Now, however, we're at the "Deep Blue" moment in Go (a dedicated computer powerful enough to defeat a top human player), and, just like in Chess in 1997, Go engines for normal computers are starting to reach the highest amateur grades. In Chess, that would be somewhere around 2450 ELO, in Go it would be around 6-7d.
I'm going by this assumption between Chess ELO and Go ranking:
1800 ELO is starting point for "serious amateur/advanced club player" <==> 1d amateur
2450 ELO is top amateur level <==> 7d amateur
2500 ELO is entry grandmaster level <==> 1p professional starting out
2850 ELO is top grandmaster level <==> 9p professional in his prime
The algorithms to play go effectively have been found. They are different than the ones for Chess, but it will be a matter of time before Monte Carlo/UCT/Neural Nets get optimized and extended to need less and less power, just like it happened in Chess with MiniMax/AlphaBeta/Quiescence/MTD(f)/Null move etcetera.
Now, 20 years after Deep Blue, a Chess Engine plays at grandmaster level on a somewhat current phone. It may take another 10-20 years for Go to reach that stage, but at some point, it will. For now, the top engines are becoming good enough to run at the strongest amateur level on a powerful off-the shelf computer... just like Chess engines in 1997.
Thus, they will be becoming more and more useful as analysis tools. I wonder if someone is thinking of a professional program like Chessbase, but for Go. At this point programs like Drago and Kombilo are very servicable already (and free even!) but they are only at the level Chessbase was at in the early 90's.
There certainly is a market here.