Author: Alberto Rezza
Date: 08:39:18 06/10/02
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On June 09, 2002 at 19:29:33, Russell Reagan wrote: >You do a very nice job of manipulating the intention of everything I said. I have to say you are wrong here. Of course, with deep enough search (say 50- to 100-ply for chess, 300-ply or more for go) strategy completely disappears and everything is tactics. Then you would be right. But if we keep the distinction betwen strategy and tactics, it is true that by reducing the size of the go board you lose a lot of strategic contents. You lose all of it if you go all the way to 2x2. So he was right and you wrong: it's not the same game. Of course this same reasoning would apply to any form of mini-chess. To put the whole discussion in perspective, here are some facts (I can give no sources now, but I could dig them up in variuos places). All the rankings I give are comparable to Japanese amateur rankings (NOT to European, USA, IGS, etc. rankings). 1. 7x7 go is almost solved. 9x9 go is widely regarded as somewhat less complex than chess, but more complex than checkers/draughts. 9x9 go is actually played, even by masters, though less than 19x19 go; 13x13 is played very little. 2. The best go programs play at about 5- or 6-kyu level; but they go down to about 10-kyu in just a few games, after the human adapts to their artificial style of play (and peculiar blunders). In my opinion, a very dedicated human beginner (one who plays every day) could reach 6-kyu in one month; however, very few people actually do it in less than one year, and some NEVER reach that level. 3. BTW, I used to be 3-dan (I'm weaker now for I don't play) and I could beat the best programs giving a 9-stone handicap, or more. 4. It's a fact that go is much more difficult TO PROGRAM than chess; but this tells us nothing about which game is more difficult FOR HUMANS to play. 5. The difficulty in programming go lies in the evaluation function, not in the branching factor. Chess programs don't even try to "think like a human" because they have found a simple shortcut that works: alpha-beta with a simple eval (material, mobility and little more) gives a reasonable level of play, even without any other refinement. In go this does not work, and no other shortcut has been found yet, so the programs have to do complex things like pattern recognition to try to find the strategic features of a position, or deep tactical searches INSIDE the eval just to see whether a group is alive or dead. Unless some unexpected breakthrough is found, I guess no program will beat a go professional (more or less the equivalent of a grandmaster) in this century. 6. The relationships (if any) among the concepts of "most complex", "most difficult" and "most interesting" game are best left to each one's opinion. Alberto
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