Re: About brute force and knowledge

[David Mechner <mechner@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Returning to the original hypothesis (of Antti Huima):

> The point is, it can be that humans play go after all in a very
> simplified way. Horrible positions can perhaps be constructed where
> best players don't have a clue what to do, but they never arise in a
> game, because humans prefer to simplify things.

> Thus, perhaps the complexity of go as a game-tree 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 guess your suggestion is that a few cheap/dumb heuristics might prune
down the branching factor enough (yet still be fast enough) to allow a
lot of search.

Maybe, but unfortunately you need more than a narrow branching factor
for massive search to work: you also need a cheap, accurate evaluation
function. Because of the difficulty and importance of life and death,
such an evaluation function has so far been elusive. If your evaluation
function gets life and death wrong, even a very massive search will give
you garbage.

-David

-- 
David A. Mechner            Center for Neural Science
mechner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx         4 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003
212.998.3580                http://cns.nyu.edu/~mechner/