Life In 19x19

I've also been wondering about the early 3-3 playing style. One thing that is on my mind, is the settings under which the network is trained.

LeelaZ/AlphaGo plays every training game with only 1600 playouts, added noise, and extra randomization in the opening.

The value which the network puts to each move, is based on games under these settings. If an opening is 47% winrate for black, it is because to the network, it looks like something where it would win 47% of the time as black under the above settings.

So you can ask - what kind of strategy can you develop when you and your opponent have limited reading ability, and you're pseudo drunk? If killing groups inside a moyo is harder in general and requires precise reading, then taking guaranteed territory sounds pretty tempting, but that's of course just speculation

So to expand upon the question of whether or not these moves are objectively good for any skill level, we can also ask if they're objectively good under any time setting/reading ability.

Would a network trained with 100.000 playouts in its training games play differently?

Yakago wrote:I've also been wondering about the early 3-3 playing style. One thing that is on my mind, is the settings under which the network is trained.

LeelaZ/AlphaGo plays every training game with only 1600 playouts, added noise, and extra randomization in the opening.

The value which the network puts to each move, is based on games under these settings. If an opening is 47% winrate for black, it is because to the network, it looks like something where it would win 47% of the time as black under the above settings.

So you can ask - what kind of strategy can you develop when you and your opponent have limited reading ability, and you're pseudo drunk? If killing groups inside a moyo is harder in general and requires precise reading, then taking guaranteed territory sounds pretty tempting, but that's of course just speculation

So to expand upon the question of whether or not these moves are objectively good for any skill level, we can also ask if they're objectively good under any time setting/reading ability.

Would a network trained with 100.000 playouts in its training games play differently?

A quick note. The evaluation in terms of percentage of wins assumes errors in play. Otherwise the evaluation will be 100% or 0%. We cannot therefore identify objectively good or bad plays.

Bill Spight wrote:A quick note. The evaluation in terms of percentage of wins assumes errors in play. Otherwise the evaluation will be 100% or 0%. We cannot therefore identify objectively good or bad plays.

This is good pedantry, but I think we can improve it .

The evaluation in terms of percentage of wins is the product of a process which incorporates errors in play. Otherwise the evaluation will be 100% or 0%. We cannot therefore identify objectively good or bad plays without some probability of error (and we do not know how big that error is).

Big picture: we don't know how far AlphaGo was from perfect play, so at some level, we can cast doubt on all of its evaluations. It's possible that the early 3-3 points are just a bias that were never exposed because humans aren't strong enough to take advantage of them. However, if we want to assess whether a move is objectively good, in most cases our best shot will be the AlphaGo oracle—for now.

Also: there is no reason to assume AlphaGo is any more biased than we are. All we know is it's better than us, so, in principle, we should assume its biases are better than ours, too.

luigi wrote:All we know is it's better than us, so, in principle, we should assume its biases are better than ours, too.

My point is this bias of liking early 3-3 invasions is not only present when it is better than us though. AG and Leela Zero like them early in their training when they are weak players, less than 1 dan. It seems odd to me that such a weak player could have discovered something closer to the objective truth of go than humans did collectively over millenia of play (well I suppose opening at 4-4 is relatively recent if we don't count the ancient chinese cross 4-4 starting position). So something like Bill suggested that a preference for corner over centre territory arrising from the way tromp taylor rules score incomplete positions seems a plausible avenue of investigation. Or maybe it's just because they are simple. Just thinking out loud AG Lee didn't do early 3-3s but Master did. Can we explain this as it needing a lot of self play to rid itself of the human bias of not playing them, whereas training from zero it can start liking them early. I suppose AG/L Zero also start doing knight move approaches to corner stones when they are weak, but as that agrees with established human knowledge I'm not surprised that they don't "grow out" of this habit or see it as remarkable.

Since a few days Leela Zero is on a 6x128 Network and since a fix yesterday with great improvements: http://zero.sjeng.org/

It will likely soon catch up the original Leela!