Re: burte force and knowledge

[johnc@xxxxxxxxx (John Clarke)]

Hi

> It's not that we're stingy, "search" happens to be a technical term in
> AI, referring to state space search (not necessarily minimax). You seem
> to intend the colloquial sense of just looking for something. 

Has this thread degenerated to dictionary flames?

How do the two definitions possibly differ?  Consider the space of
(up to) 361 legal moves.  Search is the process of finding the
good ones / best ones.

Under both definitions.

I believe all 361 are evaluated simultaneously and sunconsciously and the
best ones pop into consciousness.

> In contrast, if you are searching for a T in a field of
> L's, you will have to scan the display. Similarly in go, if you're
> looking for a shape, say a crosscut, you'll have to actively scan the
> board until you find one

But this *isn't* what happens in practice.  There are lots of studies of
where chess masters look at on chess boards and they direct their gaze
at the few interesting places.  More on this after the next point.

> accurate
> judgment of which moves will and won't work

OK.  The question is only: how does this accurate judgement happen?
We know it's not sequential processing of each possibility, and it's surely
not magic.  Parallel evaluation is the only plausible possibility.

If go had some trivial solution then it would surely have been found by now.
Go is hard, and that implies taht a substantial amount of processing is
going on internally when humans play.  We shouldn't expect computers to
do well until they do a similar amount of processing.

Regards
John Clarke
johnc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx