Author: Roy Eassa
Date: 13:22:16 02/12/04
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On February 12, 2004 at 15:23:03, William H Rogers wrote: >There are some pretty strong GO programs already outthere. They still can not >beat the masters and probably never will. Somehow they rate players using a >'stone' method which I really don't understand but the programs are more than >half-way up the stone ladder. >Bill Bill, You say that they are pretty strong, then you say that they may never beat the masters. That seems to be somewhat of a contradiction. It's sort of like a player rated 1500 being called strong because he can always beat all the unrated beginners and those rated under 1100. I think the very best Go programs are as good as a human Go player who would be the equivalent of maybe a 1600-rated chess player. Not too bad, mind you, but not "strong" in the real sense of the word. The stone ranking is based on the idea that giving a player an extra stone on the board at the start is approximately equivalent to giving him an extra ten points of territory (the measure by which you keep score) at the end. So a player who is 2 stones stronger than another must give the other 2 extra stones at the beginning for an even game, or he would win by about 20 points at the end. Amateur ranks go from 1 (best) to about 30 (the worst). The best programs are ranked at somewhere between 10 and 6 on the amateur scale, depending on whom you ask. [Professional rankings are, very confusingly, rated in the reverse order: 1 is the weakest (but still a lot stronger than an amateur ranking of 1) and 9 is the strongest.] To say that programs are more than halfway up the amateur ladder is technically true, but I don't think that being rated 1799 in chess -- 3/4 of the way between 600 (my guess for the weakest human) and 2199 (the strongest non-master) makes a human all that "strong" or any sort of threat to the REALLY strong players.
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