Re: Strong players only?

[Darren Cook <darren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>  I think that higher strength of goe will be helpful to ones goe
>programming. But more important thing is to know the essence and internal
>regularities of goe.  A professional goe player may not know them very well.

I like that phrase: "the essence and internal regularities". Because of the
success of instinct and patterns for the human player, the science of go is
underdeveloped.

To summarize the answers I received:

1.Yes, you have to be a strong player if you use hand-coded patterns and
other human knowledge in your program. Almost all the top programs at the
moment do this.

2.Yes, you have to be a strong player if your primary way of judging if a
new alogirithm is good or not is by looking at the moves it plays.

3.No, you don't have to be strong if you are planning to find and use
'internal regularities' in a brute-force way in your program, or some form
of automatic learning.

4.No, you don't have to be strong if you judge new algorithms by results
against sets of test positions and results in large numbers of games with
other programs.

Darren