Re: computer-go: FPGA

[Don Dailey <drd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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   Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 15:57:40 +0100
   From: Vincent Diepeveen <diep@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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   At 02:18 PM 8/31/00 CEST, you wrote:
   >Hi!
   >
   >>Some of the early work on AI algorithm development for chess was 
   >>interesting.
   >>That was when computers were too slow to do a brute-force, iterative 
   >>deepening
   >>search.  If Go succumbs to a brute-force, iterative deepening search, then
   >>it would seem that only imperfect information games can be used for AI
   >>algorithm development.  That will eliminate all "typical 2 player game(s) 
   >>we
   >>are used to playing."  Heavy sigh.
   >
   >Why such a sad conclusion? It would still be a challenge to write a program 
   >that plays well WITHOUT brute-force search (especially since as you say, 
   >humans don't use that method). Moreover, such an intelligent program should 
   >be definitely faster than a brute-force one (on the same hardware) - and 
   >thus better!

   The conclusion sounds weird to me: why would something more selective
   be faster? For brute force you don't lose speed. You do everything.
   When being selective 
     a) you lose speed to the selection
     b) smaller branching factor ==> more speed loss (partly result of a)

   >regards,
   >Vlad



I  think the  terminology  confuses us.   What  do we   really mean by
"Faster"?  If  this is a pure "nodes  per second" notion then  I agree
with Vincent, more AI in general will mean slower.

Maybe you mean deeper?  A selective search is supposed to "simulate" a
brute force search and in that abstract sense is "faster."

By the way, there  were some  interesting  ideas before  computers got
faster, but most of them we either useless, or not very well developed
(and now have been dropped).  

Actually, the statment that computers were  too slow to do brute-force
iterative  deepening  searches is  not really   true!  However it  was
BELIEVED at the time to be true.  The only method that had much chance
of success  back then was a full  width iterative deepening search and
it worked quite  well to everyones surprise.  If   I could go  back in
time and write a program to run on a  2 MHZ computer, I could probably
extract a small benefit  from selectivity, but it  would  be a  lot of
work  for little gain.   Selective    search  seems to  benefit   with
increasing depth.  And as Vincent says,  it takes more computing power
to make well informed decisions about when to cutoff a line.

Don