Kiseido sell an e-book download of All About Thickness
http://www.kiseidodigital.com/kdb1-toc.html

Ishida was called "the computer" by his peers, so who better to guide us to a better understanding of influence!

So i've made a start at learning what Ishida has to say and sharing my understanding of his wisdom in the first of what i hope will be a series of videos that look at what influence is and how it might be computed. https://youtu.be/OfL5XSrYuLo Update: Yishn has told me that he finds the video narrator's accent hard to understand, so i will make the next one with a different voice.

here's what i believe could be a more intuitively meaningful way of displaying Lz's win%. Each evaluated move is coloured by 2 rings, the thick inner ring is win% and the thin outer (harmonic) ring is delta(win%) which is the difference between black's win% for that move compared to black's win% just before white played her last move. The bulls-eye of the move is the colour of the player on move, in this case, black. i have also elided Sabaki's 'last move' mark, as (a) in Go, which move was last is only of historical interest (historians can easily find out by strolling back and forth, or by looking in the the game tree subwindow), and (b) its strong colour conflicts with bullseye colour. Explanation of the colour scheme rationale is provided in a GitHub message
https://github.com/SabakiHQ/Sabaki/issu ... -455859627
win% is adjusted to take into account handicap before colouring, so what Sabaki says is 92%, the handicap-adjusted scheme says is about 52%. Here, all Laizy's top moves increase black's win%, which remains within the olive zone.
P7's delta ring is a tiny bit lighter than all the others, which are all less than 1% higher than P7's (i forget the exact numbers).

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Tomorrow we will advise to not read that kind of book unless you have a good understanding on how AI play go. The reverse as what we advised yesterday.

Some stronger players did already advise me on this in my teachings...

Every woman has a right to change her mind, and every man has a right to try his level best to change it for her.

Each year, there is an annual mind-changing festival in Paris (= per Isis) at the Spring Equinox of Oestre (Isis), when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love and a young woman's head is turned toward his pocketbook by seamstress queans eager to urge her to throw away that old dress and get him to buy her a new one.

Laizy's great-grandmother was born in Paris https://xkcd.com/1263/, and the influence her daughter exerted over the minds of Dedicated Followers of Fashion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA5gJ0hZpCc cannot be overemphasised, for She Who Must Be Obeyed - the Alpha and Omega Queen of Queans of the Go catwalk - is no False Prophet but a genuine Oracle with 20-20 vision extending far over the rainbow and into the wide blue yonder, so any swine who does not heed Her pearls of wisdom is a ridiculous Bottom.

The only problem is: How the hell can we make any sense of what She says? Aye, there's the rub, for She doesn't say a damn thing, she only does (mares eat does and does eat does, but little lambs eat Ivy - poor old Ivy, doomed for all eternity to perpetually climb like Sisyphus up the wall of thickness with nowhere to Go!)

Sure, anyone can drive themself into a 3-3 corner without thinking about it, and anyone can do a double jump along the 4th line because that's what Laizy's grandmother liked to do; but surely we can learn more from Her than that??!

...surely we can learn more from Laizy than just where to play and principal variations?

i have a dream...

there is no finer commentator on Laizy than Michael Redmond, but there's only one of him and he has better things to do than comment on your and my games.

so my dream is Rbot, a Redmond-inspired AI that can tell me what's going on in a position and why such-and-such is a good move, or not, as the case may be.

to that end, i took another look at one of his commentaries to see if there were any themes that could be captured and expressed in a kind of "Go-logic".i haven't got very far, but have seen a couple of things that encourage me to think that Rbot might not be a pipe-dream, even if it's gonna take more than a weekend to write the code for.

With the help of auto-generated captions, i made the following notes on what Mr Mike said - i'm not looking so much at the variations he talks about but the language in which he talks about them. i've highlighted the key descriptive qualities that could be computable, and will explain how one of them maybe could be computed:

black: zero; white:master

1.12 [we will later see] black: groupN (big, about to die, floating around in the middle of white's moyo)
1.17 black groupN (not urgent)

game start


"slightly overconcentrated" - what does that mean? Well, it could mean that the influence emanating from white's upper wall flows over the marked point,

so that if white already had a stone there, white would have wasted that stone - i.e either she shouldnt have played it there in the first place, or she shouldnt crawl once more in the upperleft joseki because her influence radiations would then overlap too much.

overconcentration is inefficient. an influence map algorithm that actually worked properly would enable Rbot to evaluate the influence-efficiency of a move.

all Rbot would need to do is compute the influence map and measure how much the influences from the wall and a white stone on the marked point would overlap.

PS yes, yes, i know there are plenty of Goers who will think this sounds like old-fashioned "Expert Systems" which never worked and never could work, but i want to claim that those that were produced way back then were only scratching the surface and the folks back home initially expected too much of them too soon, and like bipolar people, swung too far the other way from love to hate.

It is not true that expert systems never worked. For instance, one medical expert system gave better initial diagnoses (that is, before tests were performed) than general practitioners. Also in the medical field, MDs were able to learn from an expert system and do better by themselves than either they or the system alone had done before.

It is going to take some time, but I think that the AI era will fairly quickly see humans playing much better. Even if they can't say why.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Perhaps you could try reviewing a long game backwards after reviewing it forwards. It will likely take quite a while, but the fewer options towards the end of the game should make it easier to be thorough at the start.
It might also show the moves you intuitively select as candidate moves without being influenced by previous moves (neural nets essentially read the same way as humans).



1974 #1— the Computer
2017 #1— the Computer

_________________
On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

Did you test it on 9x9? It would be interesting to see the results .

_________________
On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

A wall has different value of influence according to his own life status. A wall with eyes, or an extension or a ponnuki to take some examples are much more influent as a simple line of stones.
That's so fundamental that I don't see how to modulate a punctual influence value without implying much more concepts like life and death...

agree 100%.

in the beginning, we all marvelled at the new wunderkidsand then some people started to worry about Go engines going haywire or being manipulated by megalomaniacal oligarchs. I don't mean Michael, who is a shining star that even Neil could see and an example to us all - how he manages to keep a straight face with the antics of that middle-aged actress pretending to be a 13 year-old schoolgirl cavorting around and grinning like a Cheshire Cat at the camera i will never know! Ishida set what many believe to be an impossibly difficult challenge for Go programmers, because people don't think like computers like himbut have no fear, Ishida+Redmond - inspired https://github.com/gogre/irgobot is here to save the day and tell you the plain facts of life, death and influence:the next episode will compare Michael Redmond's analysis of a position in game 9 of Zero vs Master with what irgobot makes of it, focussing on estimating territory in the early part of the midgame.