RE: computer-go: Random move generation

["Xu, Mousheng" <moushengxu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff,

	Random moves? It really depends on how fast you could evaluate a
move. When fast enough, you might want to evaluate every legal move
instead of some random moves. :) If, and I'd like to assume, the
evaluation is not fast enough, the number of random moves you get for
consideration won't be able to give you a good move to choose from. 

	You've got to ask yourself several questions:
	1. How fast can your program evaluate a move;
	2. Based on answer to 1, how many moves can you afford to
evaluate for each turn.
	3. Based on answers to 1 & 2, what size of tree (width & depth)
you can build.

	These are some fundamental questions one has to ask himself when
considering comp-go playing strategies.

	About 6 month ago, people discussed about this sort of numbers a
lot. Building (no evaluation or whatsoever was done) a brute force
search tree for a 4 x 4 board took my program more than 2 hours before
it's killed. Currently, I am suffering the same problem -- too slow
evaluation. It took about 5-10 minutes to evaluate 4 positions (move
candidates). I am hoping to do further triming to reduce the evaluation
time. Or convert the Java program to C (400k!)

-- Mousheng Xu	

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Massung [mailto:jmassung@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, November 05, 1999 9:32 AM
To: computer-go@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: computer-go: Random move generation


Question for thought:

How good/bad is random move generation after move weighting is done?  If

there are say 3-10 moves all with the same weight, of course a depth
search 
could reveal 1 better than all, and that is ok.  But how about say at
the 
beginning of the game when many moves (say corner moves) are essentially
the 
same.  Should randomness be done to decide a move?

Wondering what other people have done here (aside from chess-like
opening 
books)?

Jeff

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