Re: computer-go: A problem with understanding lookahead

[Ray Tayek <rtayek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:36 PM 1/24/01 -0800, you wrote:
> ...
> The easily computed quantities that a Go evaluator can use (liberties,
> group size, geographical influence) are laughably bad as evaluators;
> and moving beyond these obvious elements is uncharted territory.
i wonder if anyone has had any luck with concepts like "thick" and "thin", 
or "light" and "heavy", over concentrated etc?

> ...
> The fundamental difference is that in chess, if you use simple concepts
> such as I outlined, you can understand a position and tell who is winning
> a large percentage of the time.  In Go, you undersand NOTHING until you
> have decided which stones are dead, and that is a fundamentally hard
> problem.
maybe a probability of being dead is better in the sense that a lot of 
"dead" stones get rescued later on due to liberties changing or ignoring ko 
threats. it makes sense to focus on "dead" stones, but it may be somewhat 
of a red herring?

thanks



---
ray tayek http://home.earthlink.net/~rtayek/
orange county java users group http://www.ocjug.org/
want privacy? http://www.freedom.net/
hate spam? http://samspade.org/ssw/