Re: Computer are strong?!

Mike Novack · **#21**

topazg wrote:

It would be interesting to see if this isn't accurate. Presumably, because of the fact that the number of possible variations on a 19x19 board is so much larger, 10,000 playouts on a 9x9 board will provide considerably better overall accuracy than 10,000 playouts on a 19x19 board. It would be very interesting to see this scaled to 19x19.

Possibly not true? We are dealing with statistics. Results are poor if the sample size is inadequate but above some sample size improve only slightly. It matters less that 10,000 is a larger percentage of all possible moves at 9x9 than at 19x19.

In other words, if we sample 1000 out of 1 million we do not have to sample 10,000 out of 10 million to have equally valid results (the equal validity sample size might be 1100 -- I don't have the tables to look this up but expect it to be a small change of this sort).

pasky · **#22**

Mike Novack wrote:

2) You can't go by how the algorithms of several years ago behaved so the rest of what you say is outdated. The dominant algorithm now used by all the strongest programs does not behave the way you have described. Currently performance is limited purely by time and isn't "biased" in the way you think. Given enough time these algorithms would discover the best next move. For these programs "tuning" is adjusting behavior so as to get the best performance within the constraint of actual time given the allowed computer power. How that is done might or might not introduce "bias" (it doesn't have to -- need not be deterministic*)

If you use plain RAVE, I think it's proven that MCTS does not neccessarily converge to the best move anymore. Even if it did in theory, in practice RAVE puts you in very deep valleys within the tree all the time that make it exceedingly difficult to overcome invalid biases produced by the simulations. The point of RAVE is that the valleys are mostly trails in good directions. But it's like in human play - you end up reading long, mostly straight lines with your pattern matcher feeding you with the sequence, but if it never feeds you the counter-tesuji, your reading becomes completely wrong.

It's true that it's still better than gnugo group solver never spotting the right move since it's missing from its pattern database. But it's not much better.

Mike Novack wrote:

3) Objectives differ. Are we after the strongest possible program (given the time/machine power constraint) or the strongest one that can pass or come close to passing the Turing test within that constraint? (not obviously identifiable as a non human player -- if presented with a set of games some of which between two humans and some between a human and this program you could not easily/certainly separate into the two subsets)

I think there's little interest in Turing-passing programs. Commercial programs authors do care somewhat since it matters to them how "pretty" the program plays, but overally the research does not seem to concern with this at all.

bustaballs · **#23**

I'm about 10k on KGS and I can't even begin to compete against the weakest computer on GNU Go.

Re: Computer are strong?!

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