Re: computer-go: perfect players

[Nicol Schraudolph <schraudo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2 May 2001, Fant, Chris wrote:

> I believe that Go programs will eventually surpass human players
> and go on to absolutely destroy the best of the best.  I believe this
> because of the complexity of the game.  Computers can't be stopped.  They
> will continue to approach perfect player performance.  What does the group
> think?

Hmmm, I actually believe the opposite: to me Go seems to tie much better
into the human "hardware" (mostly: our visual system) than chess, and I
see this as one reason why humans can play 19x19 Go instead of reaching
their limits at 9x9, whose complexity might be closer to that of chess.
I therefore expect building a computer system that can beat a human in Go
to be much harder than in chess.  At the opposite end of this spectrum
lie games like othello/reversi: the cumulative color reversals there
are really hard for humans to keep track of (visualize), so computers
have an easy time beating us at that game.

Regards,

-- 
    Dr. Nicol N. Schraudolph                http://www.icos.ethz.ch/
    Institute of Computational Sciences     mobile:  +41-76-585-3877
    ETH Zentrum, WET D, Weinbergstr. 43     office:      -1-632-7942
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