Re: [computer-go] Pattern matching - example play

[Heikki Levanto <heikki@xxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 06:32:06PM +0100, Frank de Groot wrote:
> 
> None of the Go programmers have ever given any arguments as to why you can't
> extract Go knowledge from game records, and be better than "manual" Go
> knowledge. 

A simple answer: trick moves. There are lots of tricky sequences that
professionals never play, because they get a result that is a little bit
less optimal than what they can get. yet such moves often offer many
ways for a less experienced opponent to screw up. Such moves do not
occur in pro games, but often amateurs use them, especially against
weaker players, and with great success.

Same kind of thing happens when people try to memorize joseki - they can
handle players who stick to josekis, but are totally lost when a player
deviates from the book line, because they do not understand the meaning
behind every move in those josekis.

To explain the same thing in other words, in pro games you see only the
results of the thought processes of the pros, but not all the
alternatives they rejected. 

There are also cases where extracting the right information from a pro
game must be quite hard. For a simple example, consider a joseki that
depends on a ladder that goes across the whole board - there are many of
those. If the ladder is favourable, the joseki is good, but if not, it
leads into a serious catastrophe. You never see the ladder in pro games,
both players know it long before it has happened, and choose variations
accordingly. I would imagine it to be awfully hard to extract the
knowledge that such a ladder was considered and found to work. It could
be possible to recognize the situations where a certain variation is
played, and note a correlation to the configuration in the opposite
corner, but that would require a lot of statistical material - for this
one joseki variation only. And still, if the opponent has deviated from the
joseki in the opposite corner, you may never have seen the position
before.



All of this is just the personal opinion of a fairly weak player (5k).
I program for living and believe to be relatively good at it, but I have
never had the time to write my own Go program. The closest I have come
to has been a little meddling with GNU Go.


Regards

  Heikki


-- 
Heikki Levanto   "In Murphy We Turst"     heikki (at) lsd (dot) dk

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