RE: computer-go: Pattern matching

[David Fotland <fotland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:33 PM 11/5/99, Darren Cook wrote:
>>Often several patterns suggest the same move, perhaps 3 to 8.  And a
>>symmetrical pattern can suggest the same move twice.
>
>Do you give any extra weight (when move ordering) to a move that was
>suggested by more than one pattern?

Yes.  But it depends on what kind of patterns match.  It's not a simple
function.

>
>>I think you need to be a strong go player, or have one to
>>suggest patterns.  The strong programs are all written by
>
>Another approach is to learn patterns from professional game records. You
>lose the ability to specify the meaning of the move (e.g. David's example
>of a running move), but you can make up for this with quantity. Katsunari
>(a program by Shinichi Sei and Toshiaki Kawashima) is upto 300,000 patterns
>and is apparently getting strong now [1].
>
>My own feeling was that quantity isn't enough, and the program has to try
>to understand the meaning of the move in some way when it is learning the
>pattern (which as you'd expect is proving hard, and dramatically slowing
>down the learning time). But I don't think my experiments ever went beyond
>learning about 2000 patterns, so maybe I should consider using a much
>bigger training set.
>
>Darren
>
>[1]. From a conversation at GPW'99. If I understood him correctly, Shinichi
>also said that the increase in strength had come from improvements in
>accuracy (evaluation function?) more than from adding more patterns.
>
>
>