In middle game positions I agree that LZ can consider a wider variety of candidate moves, and make a high quality evaluation of them far more quickly than a pro (you can add more cores to a GPU, you can't add more brains to a pro) so choose the best one, but I disagree pros evaluation of choices they both think of are better. I think it's worse (ladders and other bot foibles on low playouts excluded), and considerably so in the kind of open positions without clearly defined goals in which you see pros says things like "both possible, too hard to say" (though maybe they have stronger private thoughts). This is illustrated by pros being 20% win (and feeling behind themselves too) after just 40 moves of opening where LZ doesn't play moves the pro wouldn't conceive of. LZ is just playing 20 moves in a row picking the right one every time (or at least only a tiny bit wrong), whereas the pro maybe gets half right, a handful of minus a few percent, and makes a 10% mistake every 20 moves or so.
Take this knight move answer as an example.
Elf v1 thinks it's a big (7%) mistake. LZ thinks it's basically fine; in a few months/years maybe LZ will come to dislike it too (Facebook have lots more computing resources that the LZ volunteer contributors).
- Click Here To Show Diagram Code
[go]$$B
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$$ | . . 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
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$$ | . . . O . . . . . , . . . . . X . . . |
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$$ +---------------------------------------+[/go]
Or take the recent Iyama vs Cho Meijin game, the
post game comments Quote:
After the game, Iyama Meijin said that he had not been sure how well he was doing after the first day, but started to feel comfortable with his lead in territory after the ko on the right with which he captured several White stones. Cho 9P agreed, saying that he was happy with his position on the first day, but started to realize he was behind while playing the ko on the right. Cho said he put a good effort into the game, and would try his best in the following games of the match.
I think there's a lot of cultural modesty/politeness getting in the way here, but if
Elf/LZ are to be believed the summary should be more like Iyama saying "I was doing great after Cho played move after move of mistakes in the lower left, I got a big lead, but then just towards the end of the first day I noobed it up and it went back to even again". Does he have the evaluation/judgement skills to see this (either live or on reflection with lots of time and analysis, and as a suspicion or a confident belief?) but is just too polite to say? Something I might try is playing out this game with the greedy LZ version (that doesn't throw away points so long as it wins) to see what these big leads translate to in point margin at the end of an LZ vs LZ game.
And yes, it is interesting to watch the bots play against each other. I recently started a Elf v0 vs Elf v1 game, it was interesting to see where they differed in their evaluations and expected sequences: v0 though it was winning and v1 more even for a while, but that was shown to be predicated on v0 having a blindspot for a good move v1 played later (and one of my top 5 candidate moves). I probably won't have time to finish it so I'll upload my annotated sgf in the Elf thread.
P.S. Here's a new proverb from bots:
When your 4-4 gets invaded at 3-3, block the wrong* side.
* according to the old advice of blocking the "wider" or one with more scope for development side. It's not as perverse as it sounds, with the jump and double hane or inside cut joseki you counter-intuitively end up blocking off the side you
didn't block with the 3-4 stone after the 3-3.