So I thought: could I edit the KataGo source code to make it play according to this policy? Given its highly trained judgement, together with this odd type of handicap, would it still be superhuman, or would it be easy to beat?

It's more effort than I'm up for this week. But it turns out someone has done something very similar, with knight's moves instead of one space jumps, and put it on OGS as a bot. And it's ranked 5k there. See https://online-go.com/player/796120/KeimaBot

Could be fiendishly hard to beat in handicap games. If we assume that it is allowed to play some other moves. Unless moves like blocking, hane, nobi, atari and capture are allowed I can't see how it could work. I think the keima bot is playing exclusively knight moves, this wouldn't work at all with one space jumps. The difference is that knights move can reach all near by intersections in just a few moves but one space jumps can never play some intersections.

It does seem like circular reasoning to me. For one thing you appear to justify your view about points differences by referring to the same points differences.

I just don't see why the important thing is the magnitude change in computer evaluation rather than any other criteria.

I would suggest that it is more important to learn something, anything, than it is to somehow identify the right thing to learn. If someone could always learn one thing from every game that they played then that would be greater capacity to improve in this game than that of pretty much everyone else. Even if only by small steps the impact is huge with enough iterations.

Since humans, and animals for that matter, learn really fast from only a few positive examples I'd also suggest the interesting question isn't how to identify mistakes but how to identify lessons that can be learned easily. For example that the one space jump is never bad.



Perspective is to me something intrinsic that can't be eliminated. Maybe you can change perspectives (but this seems hard) the way you could change your standpoint. You can try to offer more than one perspective if one doesn't do. The history of perspective in art is really very interesting, go back about 1000 years and no one appears to be able get it right. There is something called Byzantine perspective or reverse perspective, which projects images onto canvas with no regard for the viewer. Leaving the one that is to experience the art, or the game review, out of the equation isn't the accepted way to offer an experience of something objective.