Re: computer-go: new strategy game with $10,000 prize

[David Schneider-Joseph <david@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 08:04  PM, Bob Myers wrote:

> Having freedom to place your pieces at the beginning of the game as 
> Arimaa
> allows certainly changes the nature of the opening book, but hardly 
> makes it
> irrelevant.  Certain categories of starting positions will be 
> identified as
> most favorable, and standard openings will grow up around them.  And of
> course Go already has this characteristic -- with the freedom to place 
> your
> pieces anywhere you like starting at the first move, which doesn't 
> seem to
> have prevented the development of thousands of joseki.
A criticism of this point: Yes, in go, as in chess, accepted 
fusekis/openings have developed over time.  However, in go, it is 
possible to deviate from any known fuseki and still have an acceptable 
line of play.  In chess, *almost* all acceptable openings have already 
been mapped out pretty well.  So, it is easier to "trick" a go-playing 
computer by deviating from the fuseki, without risking much.

Because of the substantial increase in the number of reasonable 
openings in Arimaa over chess, it is possible (I don't know) that a 
human player with a deeper understanding of the game than a computer 
has will be able to "trick" computers just like they can in go, by 
deviating from any known opening in a way that the computer simply 
can't understand.

David Schneider-Joseph - http://www.davidsj.com/
Director and Webmaster, ASFAR - http://www.asfar.org/
Chief, Tewata - http://www.tewata.com/