Re: [computer-go] citation

[Martin Girard <arister@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 14, 2004, at 15:22, Nicol Schraudolph wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, David Weiss wrote:
>
> > I don't think that the issue has as much to do
> > with the size of the board, as the fact that there
> > is a single objective in Chess, checkmate the king.
> > Imagine if the board was larger, but there were
> > 5 kings and you had to capture 3 of them to win.
>
> Excellent, now I finally  know how to explain Go to chess players:
> there are 180 kings a side, but they can't move... :-)
>
> Seriously, this is what Go can feel like from a chess perspective.
>
>
> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, David Weiss wrote:
>
> > One aspect hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread AFAICS: it is not
> > the case that go programs are not playing well but that people are.
>
> This is a very good point.  Humans play go much better than chess because
> go directly ties into the strengths of our visual system, such as pattern
> recognition and completion.  Chess is like reading "under the stones" all
> the time, which is significantly harder than, say, reading a ladder (to
> tie 3 current topics into a single post :-) across an open board.
>
> The worst game in this regard is othello/reversi, where pieces change
> color at every move - it's no wonder that computers are much better at
> that than humans.

There's that aspect indeed.

There's also the facts that the othello board is small and the number of choices one can make are much fewer; you just can't play anywhere you like on the board. This is of course perfect for brute force search. One more thing; it is easier to evaluate one player's advantage for Othello than for Go or Chess, as well as properties such as life. Therefore strategy is more simple for a computer to understand.

I remember my old Nintendo 8-bit playing Othello decently and that thing only uses a ~1MHz 6502.

--Martin

> Best,
>
> - nic
>
> -- 
> Dr. Nicol N. Schraudolph               http://www.schraudolph.org/
> Sonnenkopfweg 17
> D-87527 Sonthofen, Germany
>
>
>
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