Author: Daniel Kang
Date: 20:24:49 11/20/00
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On November 20, 2000 at 17:26:26, Bob Durrett wrote: >On November 20, 2000 at 14:30:04, Daniel Kang wrote: >>I'd also like to add that this characteristic (looking at all moves rather than >>blindingly following their intuition to limit the search to a couple of good >>moves) is probably a strength of computer programs rather than a weakness. The >>reason why humans rely on pattern matching rather than searching for move >>selection is because their searching capacity is severely limited, not because >>searching is an inferior method. In some sense, a human brain is a massively >>parallel super-duper fault-tolerant computer specialized for pattern >>recognition, yet to be matched in power by silicon-based number crunchers. I >>just don't think it's a sound idea to imitate the human process, when current >>methods have already yielded programs that outplay almost all humans, with >>machines far less sophisticated than brains of even the dumbest humans. >A tree can get extremely large very fast if you look at all possible moves from >a position. Even if you were to look only at two moves for each position, think >about the size of 2**n where n is the number of half-moves. If that is OK with >you, then think of what happens to 3**n, 4**n, etc. As the number of moves gets >larger, the tree explodes. Hence people's efforts to prune and selectively >search. The problem is real! There's no getting around the fact that if the tree is meant to explode, it perhaps should. There's no magic that allows you to reduce the branching factor of a game. In fact, a human probably spends more processing power to reduce the move possibilities to two for one position than it takes a computer to look ahead 7 moves deep without missing any possibility. People don't do selective search because it is better, they do it because it's something that allows them to use their strength, whereas the alternative exposes their weaknesses. On the other hand, machines have the speed and precision to do exhaustive search, and there's no reason why they shouldn't. Also, alpha-beta pruning allows one to arrive at a correct minimax solution without having to search the entire tree, so your math is a bit off there as well. Dan.
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