Re: computer-go: Proposal for an electronic journal of computer go

["Magnus Persson" <magnus.persson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Julian Richardson wrote:

> I think such articles would be of interest, and help to make a more
> balanced and readable journal. If, however, we go down this route, and 
> if we don't have peer review, but instead the kind of committee review
> suggested earlier, then I think we are no longer publishing a serious
> academic journal.

I agree with Julian about peer review here, and I want to try to make this 
point clearer.

Sofar most people who have responded have voiced the opinion that this is 
a great idea but that peer review is unnecessary, but I'd like to argue that 
peer review is a necessity if there is any point in having a journal at all.

In psychology (my subject), it is almost impossible to write a paper that 
goes to print after one round directly because the subject is too complex. 
This is not bad because one can always make the points clearer, answer 
questions that one did not think of until a reviewer did, make references to 
other papers you never heard of until a reviewer told you about it etc.

Peer review is not just a question of which papers are published or not, but 
the quality of *every* paper published. I think the rejection ratio of this 
journal will be rather low, whatever system is used so it will not scare away 
authors, but the main effect of the review is that the quality is increased.

As hinted by Antti there are two kinds of potential authors.

The first kind of author has a go program that plays *well* but is not 
persuing an academic career. Any kind of paper from this author would be 
interesting, even if it perhaps only describes the program or some method it 
uses, without revealing the details. 

The second kind of author has a program that barely beats Wally (poor 
Wally, why is everybody so obsessed with beating this program?) thanks 
to some new algorithm that solves some well defined but narrow problem in 
computer go, or perhaps applies some machine learning technique that do 
not make it all the way to a strong program but is interesting in a academic 
sense etc. A paper from this author should fulfill academic criteria: it has to 
be original, relate clearly to other published papers and the details should 
be clear enough to make any go programmer able to replicate the content 
of the article.

If the second kind of author is persuing an academic career, a journal that 
is not peer reviewed is completely uninteresting because it does not 
*count*. The academic world is a culture of "publish or perish". If  I in the 
future apply for a job, a paper published on an arbitrary web page do not 
count regardless of the content. If it is in a peer reviewed journal it will at 
least count as one minimum unit of academic credit. Such a person would 
rather publish somewhere else and give the reference to the Go 
Bibliography page of Marcus Enzenberger, which by the way is a goldmine 
already if you have not yet visited it:
 
http://home.t-online.de/home/markus.enzenberger/compgo_biblio.html

It may be necessary to have two different kinds of papers accepted in the 
journal. Normal ones for the academic people, and special ones for the 
commercial programmers. Both kinds should be peer reviewed and of about 
the same quality but the kind of content could differ a lot.

Summary:

** Keep peer review, for quality and scientific credibility. Yes, I am selfish :-
) in this respect if you wonder.

By the way, biannual publication is enough, judging from the high ;-) traffic 
on this mailing list recently, or are you busy writing papers?

Best wishes

Magnus Persson








--
Magnus Persson
Department of psychology, Uppsala University
Box 1225, SE-751 42, Sweden
Tel 018-471 2141 (work), 018-460264 (home)
MAILTO: magnus.persson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
URL: http://www.docs.uu.se/~magnuspe