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

[William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 04:39:30PM -0500, 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?

You can relax, I think. I offered the idea in the spirit of a cute
trick, not My Final Wise Ruling On The Way Things Should Be Done, and
in any case I'm not likely to rise to a position to impose such
rulings on everyone within a mere 10 years.:-) Also, note that I
conjectured the idea might be practical 10 years out; if you compare
the size of disks 10 years ago to the size of RAM today, you can see
that I was extrapolating to a time when your lookups in very large
tables might not slow your program down as much as they do today.

I might enjoy participating in such a high-speed Go tournament (and I
might even enjoy it more than participating in a tournament where the
tournament organizers demanded the right to read everyone's
programs...) but I think mostly it would be the way I enjoyed
competing in the lightning division of the ICFP programming contest
  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/proj/plclub/contest/index.php
(For the ICFP lightning contest my answer to "is a program to be
disqualified because it was written too slowly in your opinion" would
be "yes"; do you think that's highly unfair to people who prefer
programming at a more sedate pace?) It can be fun seeing how good a
program can be when it is under the artificial limitation that it and
all of its support software has to be banged out in 24 hours. One can
enjoy such a contest without advocating stomping out all software
written without that artificial limitation. And I don't think I'm a
hypocrite for having written
  http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/icfp04-discuss/2004-June/000347.html
while also having worked on my current Go-playing program for some
years now, and I wouldn't think less of myself or of you for
continuing to work on a program which played more slowly even if
someday someone runs a tournament for faster-than-human programs.

-- 
William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
"There's nothing an agnostic can't do as long as he doesn't know
whether he believes in anything or not." - Monty Python.
PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C  B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C
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