Re: computer-go: A problem with understanding lookahead

[Darren Cook <darren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>In go it's much harder to make an openings book as we
>all very well realize.
>
>A chessprogram without an openingsbook would never beat
>a professional chessplayer as they are directly killed
>strategically.

There was a paper presented by Ernst Heinz at CG2000 on self-play in chess
[1], which showed the value of each additional ply of search (and also
showed diminishing returns).

He used an opening book. It would be very interesting to see the results of
self-play with different sizes of opening books rather than different
search depths. And to repeat Heinz's experiment without the opening book.
Any students out there looking for a research project? :-).

It would give us some hard data to use in the arguments about relative
importance of search and knowledge.

Darren


[1] E.A. Heinz. 
     New self-play results in computer chess. 
     In 2nd International Conference on Computers and Games, I. Frank and
T.A. Marsland (eds.), to be published (LNCS series by
     Springer), December 2000.