"Freestyle" game engines?

[Numsgil]

A while back I read about "freestyle" tournaments where computers, humans, a human controlling a computer, groups of humans, space aliens, or whatever, would compete against each other. I can't find any references to it right now, unfortunately.

Anyway, the idea has sort of gnawed away at me over the last few months and the idea of a human controlled computer as a single player really intrigues me. Reading ability tends to decline with age (I have no corrobarating data. But anecdotal evidence seems to support this), but that's the one thing that computers are actually really good at. Whereas pattern recognition and strategic vision is something that humans are really good at and computers really aren't. So I'd expect a properly trained human-computer team to dominate other strictly human or strictly computer players. More than the sum of its parts, so to speak.

The tasks the human would ask the computer are pretty obvious. Things like: can this group make life? Can this connection be cut? Does black have to respond if white tries to force in this way? Whats the score? Show me a heatmap of past database games for this corner position. Lots of these tools already exist.

It's the life-and-death and tesuji problems that I'm not sure about. Obviously they're good candidates for monte-carlo searches. And if the human seeds the program with some likely candidate moves first that might be good, you should get even better results. But I'm not familiar with any programs floating around that can really do this at all. The technology should exist, it's just a matter of interfacing with the various engines. Does anyone have any ideas? Basically you'd want to feed it a board position, set some strategic goals (connect these two groups. Kill this group), and get back something like a heat map showing promising moves that the human can evaluate.

[emeraldemon]

Have you seen GoTools? http://lie.ac.brocku.ca/gotools/index.php?

[Phelan]

A while back I read about "freestyle" tournaments where computers, humans, a human controlling a computer, groups of humans, space aliens, or whatever, would compete against each other. I can't find any references to it right now, unfortunately.

Are you thinking of 3-hirn?