Re: computer-go: speculative introspection

[William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 10:41:28AM +0100, Heikki Levanto wrote:
> William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > How it is that I can step up to a Go board and recognize quickly that
> > there's a solid white connection between point A and point B? Even
> > when the connection involves tens of stones, my wetware seems to
> > notice it in perhaps 500 milliseconds. 
> 
> 
> You could have two images of the board, one with the actual stones, and one
> with a "simplified" picture of it. Between these two you'd have a huge
> number of pattern matchers, that convert a connecting pattern into a solid
> connection. Then all you have to do is to trace the path of solid stones
> from A to B.  There may be multiple levels of this, first recognising likely
> cutting patterns and their failures, and only then simplifying.
> 
> . . . . . .
> A . X . . X
> . . X . . .
> . . . . X .
> . . . . . X
> . . . . . .
> . . . . . .
> . . . . B .

Actually, I'd be interested even to know how the brain quickly
recognizes solid connections from A to B:

 . . . . . .
 A X X X X X
 . . X . X .
 . . . . X .
 . . . X X X
 . . . X . .
 . . . X X .
 . . . . B .

Bringing in the fancy patterns makes it a more interesting challenge,
but even for the simple challenge, I'm having trouble guessing how
it's done in neurons.

For the fancy challenge, I agree that there are probably zillions of
pattern matchers in parallel. That makes sense from an engineering
point of view, and matches what little I know about early visual
processing (edge detection and so forth).

-- 
William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
software consultant
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