Re: Ratings on go servers

[Darren Cook <darren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I'm doing all my tuning now using games lost on the servers rather 
>than tuning against other programs.

That's interesting. How automatic is your tuning process?

E.g. at one extreme you look at the games, use your own judgement to pick
out a handful of bad moves (which I'd guess would often cluster because
they'd be based on a bad life/death decision), then use your knowledge of
the program to go into the code and change/add something. Then retest on
that position to check your improvement worked.

At the other extreme, and from the other direction, you create a set of
programs that vary in one parameter. Then play N games with each version of
the program, and see which has the highest winning ratio. IIRC, Mick is
doing something like this with Go4++. I'm not sure it is workable with the
servers though.

My own program (which has sadly been in deep-freeze for the past few
months) trains by learning the patterns for the opponents moves in games it
loses. The theory being that then it will know the correct counter-attack
when it is doing search, and will hopefully then realize it has to avoid
that branch. One problem with this is that it also learns opponent
mistakes, which can pollute the database.

Darren