Re: computer-go: A problem with understanding lookahead

[Don Dailey <drd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>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.

And this is absolutely correct.

The fact that the opening  book is so  important in Chess, should make
it painfully  obvious that Chess programs still  have  very far to go.
Obviously, if each ply of search improves a program  so much (and this
is a proven fact) and they STILL cannot figure  out what opening moves
are best, then  we need  to readjust our  viewpoint of  how simple and
easy it is to evaluate Chess positions.



   From: Darren Cook <darren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

   >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. 




Ernst  Heinz  experiment involved more  games  that had ever been done
before.  It was an excellent paper, and he  always writes high quality
papers.

Ernst used the  opening books to  provide variety.  Without this,  you
would  just get a lot   of the same  games  being played over and over
again!  It  could  still be  done   but you would   have to  provide a
mechanism to vary the games, and this almost always negatively impacts
the quality of the games.


Don