Re: [computer-go] how to use GTP in place of GMP

[Don Dailey <drd@xxxxxxx>]

Hi David,

I  agree, playing well  should be  the goal.   Computer Go  has always
seemed odd to  me because it seems like all the  programs are fixed up
to play really  quickly.  Everyone complains how abouot  how much they
stink, but they  whip out moves instantly, almost as  if they know all
they need to know to play a move.

There  is a  different mentality  about this  than in  computer chess,
probably because  computer chess responds  very naturally to  a highly
scalable algorithm (called global search.)

So if  your program  plays just slightly  better than mine,  but yours
takes 100 times longer to  compute, is your program really better?  In
computer chess the  answer is no, but in computer  go the answer seems
to be YES.

My  program takes  a  very long  to play  a  good move  (good being  a
relative term of  course :-) It's very scalable, so I  can lose to any
program and beat  any program if we can simply  ignore the clock.

Go programs  care a lot  about time,  but it seems  to be only  in the
sense that it is a sin to take more than a second to move.

Of course I'm not familiar with  all programs.  I am curious about the
commercial programs, do they all play "hair on fire" speed go?

- Don



   Programs are already disqualified for being slow: it is now the norm 
   that
   a program must play a game in an hour and I cannot get my code to do
   that even though I run on a cluster of very fast CPUs. So at this time I
   cannot participate in any competition. But given the present paranoid
   climate, I cannot compete anyway because I am not even going to
   consider packing up my cluster for transport to a tournament site. The
   only solution I can think of is to host a tournament at my site.

   With the present state of Go programming I think that just being able to
   play well should be the goal, not to play well and fast, but that is 
   just me.

   I view the biggest security issue to be sneak attacks on the other 
   computer.
   For this a referee program in the middle to inspect and buffer the 
   communication
   stream seems like the best idea. Our group has just (today) started  on
   such a program. If it proves of interest, and I imagine it might given 
   the
   volume of email on these subjects the last few days, we will gladly make
   our code available in the normal GNU public license sense.

   Cheers,
   David


   On Aug 13, 2004, at 2:39 PM, Richard Brown wrote:

   > William Harold Newman wrote:
   >
   >> Another possibility, perhaps only marginally practical now,
   >> but probably more practical in ten years, might be to play games with
   >> an average time allowance so short (perhaps 250 milliseconds per move?
   >> 150?) that humans can't react fast enough to be helpful.
   >
   > Hmmm.   Not merely impractical, but highly unfair to my program,
   > which has to do some disk access, because the pattern database is
   > too large to fit into memory.  That disk access makes my program
   > slow, and your proposal punishes me for that.
   >
   > Is such a program to be disqualified, just because it's "slow"
   > in your opinion?

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