Re: [Fwd: Re: Strong players only?]

["Serge Boisse STNA 7P (33) 562 14 5731" <boisse@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> "The weakest player ever to develop a strong chess program was Claude Jarry.
> Jarry developed L'EXCENTRIQUE while an undergraduate student at McGill in the
> late 1970s. L'EXCENTRIQUE's shining moment came at the 1980 World Championship
> in Linz, Austria where it defeated the reigning World Champion CHESS 4.9 in
> the first round. Jarry, a fantastic programmer, knew so little about chess
> that the only way he could tell whether L'EXCENTRIQUE was winning or losing
> was by reading the score provided by the program after each move. His success
> dramatizes another lesson of computer chess: A programmer can develop a
> program much better than himself. [emphasis mine]
> 
[...skipped..]

> But here are two analyses of mine:
> 
> 1. The Machine, whether by brute force or logical algorithm, is the entity
> that's supposed to come up with the magical, winning answers, not the Human.
> That's what computers are for; that's how they do certain classes of
> intellectual jobs better (faster) than humans. The ideal game-playing machine
> should win based chiefly or entirely on just The Rules of The Game as First
> Principles. (Not at first, of course; but by learning from thousands of games
> worth of its mistakes.)
> 
> 2. Why would a person want to invest so much of his or her life to create a
> powerful chess or Go-playing machine?
> 
> Here I think the lousy chess/Go player has the great psychological edge.
> Decades of being humiliated by 13-year-olds ... that terrible moment when you
> finally realize (like Solieri in "Amadeus") that the best you'll ever be is a
> mediocre player ... such people who also have programming skills just
> naturally develop an obsession to build a chess or Go Frankenstein monster for
> revenge. And revenge can be every bit as sweet as you fantasize it to be; look
> at what an unsportsmanlike whining baby Kasparov was when Deep Blue beat him.
> 
> I'll never even get the chance to be beaten by the word's greatest Go master
> ... but I could write a program ...
> 
> Bob Merkin
> 
> http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/

hey, I DO NOT AGREE !

Computer go is definitely not like computer chess because we do know very well
that brute force will *never* be an issue in computer go : a good go programm
HAS TO include a lot of knowlegde about go, and may be also about questions that
have arosone in AI field. That's why a lot of people find go programming so
exciting.

The kind of question you have to answer are :

-what is a good judgement of a situation ? (I do not mean an evaluation fonction
because I'm quite sure that you cannot summarize a (statically) complex position
in a single number  : so what ?

-what kind of "common knowledge" a good go program have to include ? maybe all
Lenat's CYC expert system knowledge ! 

-furthermore, since go is much more a "spacelike" game than a "timelike" one (I
mean the current strength of your stones is generally not a question that can be
solved by a 20-ply (or even 100-ply !) search), we have to know how human are so
good at pattern recognition, image recognition, etc..


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 |  Serge Boisse                                         |
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 |  tel: (33)562 14 5731                                 |
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