Re: brute force and knowledge

[johnc@xxxxxxxxx (John Clarke)]

Hi

> >The brain isn't doing a lot of serial (eg. tree search) computation - since
> >pros can play fast, so it must be a big parallel evaluation.
> >
> >You don't see the parallel search because it is subconscious.  That's why the
> >pro's find it hard to say what made the move the best.  The search is almost
> >certainly some kind of pattern matching since that's what we excel at.
> 
> Can you redefine what you say?
> 
> LIttle confused here what you mean to express. 
> I see clear difference between:
>   'pattern matching' and 'parallel search'

Please don't think that the only kind of search is alpha-beta pruned minimax.
Certainly that's the best way for chess, but this is go.

Think of search as just being "looking for the best move".

Possibly pattern matching could be coupled with trying lots of random (or
somehow directed) moves to find good shapes on the board.  ("Wouldn't
it be nice if it looked like this?")  Then one could play the move that
appears in most of the good shapes.

The problem with a mechansitic pattern matching (one stimulus => one response)
is that one can get trapped in local maxima.  The player may need to allow
the situation on the board to appear to deteriorate for a while in order
to get to something even better.

So imagine something like a continous process of (1) matching patterns all
over the board, (2) trying (sequences of) random moves all over the board,
(3) finding consistently good moves (4) using results of (3) to direct the
moves tried in (2).  This is a parallel pattern matching search.  (Very
similar to the simulated annealing go program mentioned earlier in this
thread.)

Notice there's no tree search here.  Just a process of finding moves likely
to be good.  Those suggestions are then refered to the conscious brain for
checking - by tree search.

Regards
John Clarke
johnc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx