Re: computer-go: Insight of a human continued

[Heikki Levanto <heikki@xxxxxx>]

William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Incidentally, this makes me marvel at how much secret stuff my brain
> is doing to analyze Go. In my brain, at least, the analysis of tenuki
> goes on below the level which is visible to introspection. I'm dimly
> aware that it took me many games to learn to deal with tenuki. (I'm
> AGA 2 dan now, so that was a while ago.:-) But what was my brain doing
> during that time? And what lurks in my brain now, thinking about
> tenuki without me being able to understand how?

This is another, and IMO at least as interesting question. What actually
goes on in a brain when it plays go. (Of course, my criticism of game-theory
not being very relevant to current state of computer go applies even more
here. So, I digress...)

You do make an important point, in dividing "what the brain does" into what
we can see and analyze, and what we can not. Not to get too Freudian, but
there is a lot going on in the lower levels.  I have seen that in ordinary
sort of programming too, how often it helps to overload the top level of the
brain with something different (play quake or go), and let the important
problems simmer in the deeper levels...

This raises many more questions than it answers:
 - How can we know how our brains operate on these levels? 
 - How much of that would be useful in writing go programs?
 - Can we ever know anything/much/everything about this?

Comments, anyone? Answers? 

- Heikki

-- 
Heikki Levanto     LSD Levanto Software Development   heikki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
               "In Murphy we Turst"