Re: About brute force and knowledge...

[Antti Huima <huima@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Gary  Boos wrote:

> > Thus, perhaps the complexity of go as a game-three searching problem is
> > not so overwhelming as it looks, if we just take it for granted that
> > humans usually play only moves of certain type, usually explainable by
> > some heuristic concepts instead of an enumeration of 10^10 variations.

> I dare you to list the heuristic concepts.

Who could give a complete listing? What I mean is the following.
Consider the following situation, black (X) to play:

. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . + . . . . . + . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O O a . . . . + . . . . . b . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . + . . . . . + . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . O X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I assume most players would play 'a' without thinking much about it.
However, it is not clear whether it is really the biggest move in the
situation. Humans prefer to play 'a', because it gets an 'almost solid
wall' (heuristic concept) and thereby lots of 'influence' (heuristic
concept). A theoretical player able to compute the exact game-theoretic
value of the position could possibly play somewhere else.

The point is, humans are capable in attaining well-defined, quite
short-term goals (such as building a wall) but cannot exactly count the
score difference of the two positions where black plays, say, 'a' and then
'b' instead of 'a'.

(Does somebody want to give an estimation of the relative values of 'a'
and 'b'?)

(This example may be a really bad one.)

-- 
Antti Huima