computer-go: unsubscribe

["Landon (alleg)" <proctol@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Vincent Diepeveen <diep@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <computer-go@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001 7:36 PM
Subject: Re: computer-go: A problem with understanding lookahead


> At 10:03 PM 1/18/01 +0100, you wrote:
> >> The random algorithm plays very badly, but the point  is that is still
> >> plays MUCH BETTER than totally random moves.
> >
> >Just a wondering: the "random evaluation function" must be deterministic
> in order for that to be true, isn't it? Deterministic in the meaning that
> for a given position it will return the same value every time, otherwise
if
> the values change every time a position is evaluated (assuming no caching
> for the game tree) it doesn't seem to be possible to get something else
> than a random play...
>
> When we talk about half a billion of evaluated nodes and
> huge search depths like 12 plies in the random chess
> experiment or sometimes bigger search depths
> (searching random
> with alfabeta one
> can easily search at a simple PIII800 with like 2 million
> nodes a second in a chessprogram, in a GO program a magnitude more
> of course), then it doesn't matter whether it's
> deterministic or non-deterministic.
>
> Let's assume for example a random generator giving scores between
>   -1000 and 1000
>
> Now if we get half a billion scores from it instead of
> just being busy with weird theoretic assumptions about
> 3 or 4 random deterministic numbers, then
> you start to slowly realize the scale of the experiment.
>
> Whether your random generator is deterministic or nondeterministic
> is of course not an issue as long as it's not delivering always
> a constant score. a RANDOM score between -1000 and 1000 in the
> above example is all we need.
>
> At billions nodes a second talking about worst case behaviour is
> also no issue anymore. The size of the search tree
> and the number of nodes is so overwhelming that we can easily
> generalize and get down to the facts instead of talking about
> worst cases and bad luck.
>
> >regards, Vlad
>
>