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Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

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Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#101

Post by joelangeway »

tunesmith wrote: post #2

Just because the number of legal positions is computed doesn't mean we're anywhere close to "solving" 18x18 Go, right? What's the utility of computing the number of legal positions?

One example that just occurred to me: The base 2 log of the number of legal positions of a 9x9 go game is about 126.3, which means if I use a good hash of board positions yielding twice that number of bits, I have a better than 50/50 chance of having no collisions. That is very good to know if you've got anything like a transposition table in a Go playing program.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#102

Post by kylebrown »

davepeck wrote: post #22
everyone wrote: post #11

Anyone here play? It is pretty much the ultimate boardgame. Its like game-theory the game. From the very start you are embroiled in interesting risk/reward and provoking you opponent to overextending type stuff. Great place to play is gokgs.com I actually cant play many strategy games anymore because I realize this is like go with a load of crap thrown on it. My friend and I call this 'false complexity' the game isnt…

(I do. If anyone's interested, I made a little site you can play a casual game of Go; no complexity to getting started, since play is by email correspondence: http://go.davepeck.org/ The sources are at https://github.com/davepeck/game-of-go under the MIT license -- I have a long list of things I'd love to work on if I could find the time.)

Cool, thanks for providing the option to change the board size. A good way to start is to play short games on a 9x9 board (19x19 is the official size, but games take a very long time to play out at that massive size). Just find a friend (or against yourself), and play out a bunch of games as quickly as you can, without overthinking every move. Doing this, you'll discover strategies much quicker on a small board than you could playing out games on large board.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#104

Post by manifestsilence »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #83
everyone wrote: post #11

Anyone here play? It is pretty much the ultimate boardgame. Its like game-theory the game. From the very start you are embroiled in interesting risk/reward and provoking you opponent to overextending type stuff. Great place to play is gokgs.com I actually cant play many strategy games anymore because I realize this is like go with a load of crap thrown on it. My friend and I call this 'false complexity' the game isnt…

I play and love both Go and MtG, and I think your assessment of MtG is not fair. The thing about MtG is that the real fun is not as much in playing the game itself but in the deck building. When I'm playing a game of MtG, I'm not thinking only about the current game or how to win it, but rather which cards/combos are working well, which are not working, what cards I should use instead, etc. to improve my deck for the…

A lot of the "false complexity" in MtG comes from the wide variety of trivial differences between cards. Deckbuilding becomes an exercise in, depending on format, sifting through some 10,000 (probably more by now) cards to determine which are synergistic.

I wish they would strip out the trivially different cards, particularly the ones that are strictly better or worse than another, such as two identical cards but one has a higher cost for no reason.

Some of the cruft is due to rebalancing as the game evolved, but some is just part of the artificial scarcity model of making many of the common cards worse than the best rare ones.

I agree, though, that MtG has a very broad and creative tree of possibilities. In the pure board game world, it is perhaps more similar to Arimaa.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#105

Post by john_b »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #83
everyone wrote: post #11

Anyone here play? It is pretty much the ultimate boardgame. Its like game-theory the game. From the very start you are embroiled in interesting risk/reward and provoking you opponent to overextending type stuff. Great place to play is gokgs.com I actually cant play many strategy games anymore because I realize this is like go with a load of crap thrown on it. My friend and I call this 'false complexity' the game isnt…

I play and love both Go and MtG, and I think your assessment of MtG is not fair. The thing about MtG is that the real fun is not as much in playing the game itself but in the deck building. When I'm playing a game of MtG, I'm not thinking only about the current game or how to win it, but rather which cards/combos are working well, which are not working, what cards I should use instead, etc. to improve my deck for the…

> "What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules"

This is an odd criticism. It's the essence of DRY applied to a context with very limited space (the physical surface of the card). Would you really prefer to have something like this written out in 2pt font?

http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html

Having a named mechanic also enables rulings to apply to it, rather than just to individual cards with a particular wording. The keywords they introduce do create a learning curve for new players, but this is Magic we're talking about--not exactly a game for people afraid of learning curves.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#106

Post by lambda »

CurtMonash wrote: post #86
lambda wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's interesting in the sense of combinatorial game theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_game_theory ) not the branch of decision theory for interactive rational agents known as game theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory ). Two only very distantly related subjects which unfortunately have confusingly similar names.

Got it. That said, I use "game theory" in the sense in which it's defined, not least because my thesis was in the subject. :)

Yes, that is the meaning of plain old "game theory", and I also think that's the meaning that the person you were replying to meant; I just wanted to point out that there is something with "game theory" in its name which is much more applicable to Go.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#107

Post by cstoner »

joelangeway wrote: post #101
tunesmith wrote: post #2

Just because the number of legal positions is computed doesn't mean we're anywhere close to "solving" 18x18 Go, right? What's the utility of computing the number of legal positions?

One example that just occurred to me: The base 2 log of the number of legal positions of a 9x9 go game is about 126.3, which means if I use a good hash of board positions yielding twice that number of bits, I have a better than 50/50 chance of having no collisions. That is very good to know if you've got anything like a transposition table in a Go playing program.

Generally, a Zobrist hashing system is used (which is a specific type of transpositon table) for Go. It's also probably used for chess, but I don't follow chess AIs as closely.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#108

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

manifestsilence wrote: post #104
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play and love both Go and MtG, and I think your assessment of MtG is not fair. The thing about MtG is that the real fun is not as much in playing the game itself but in the deck building. When I'm playing a game of MtG, I'm not thinking only about the current game or how to win it, but rather which cards/combos are working well, which are not working, what cards I should use instead, etc. to improve my deck for the…

A lot of the "false complexity" in MtG comes from the wide variety of trivial differences between cards. Deckbuilding becomes an exercise in, depending on format, sifting through some 10,000 (probably more by now) cards to determine which are synergistic. I wish they would strip out the trivially different cards, particularly the ones that are strictly better or worse than another, such as two identical cards but one…

But, but... sifting through 10,000 cards to determine which are synergistic is half of the fun!

I really love the feeling of seeing an interesting card in a new expansion, and thinking that it might go well with some obscure card that you remember from some obscure expansion from 15 years ago. And researching what that card actually did. It really feels like being a wizard and going to an ancient forgotten grimoire to see if you can find a use from a long-forgotten spell. I especially enjoy realizing that a card that was considered universally crappy and never saw serious use is suddenly useful.

I agree that the cards that are strictly worse than others could have been avoided. But they don't really do that much anymore (they seldom release commons that do nothing like Hill Giant or Grizzly Bear, for example). And they can still be fun in formats like Type III, or Limited as new players call it.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#109

Post by Someone »

joelangeway wrote: post #101
tunesmith wrote: post #2

Just because the number of legal positions is computed doesn't mean we're anywhere close to "solving" 18x18 Go, right? What's the utility of computing the number of legal positions?

One example that just occurred to me: The base 2 log of the number of legal positions of a 9x9 go game is about 126.3, which means if I use a good hash of board positions yielding twice that number of bits, I have a better than 50/50 chance of having no collisions. That is very good to know if you've got anything like a transposition table in a Go playing program.

You don't really need that precise an estimate.

  81 * 2log3 ~= 128.38
So, the number of legal positions is only a factor of about 5 down from the number of positions disregarding life.

Re: Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go

#110

Post by tunesmith »

pathikrit wrote: post #60

I want to learn Go. I would like to practice against a bot first before I get on KGS. What is a good Go program I can run on my Mac to practice against? The AI does not need to be very good at all since I am novice. Once I get familiar with rules, I will play online against players. What is a good Go client to play online on the Mac?

There is a way to compile GoGui so it is a mac app. Through it you can play against GnuGo (brew install gnugo), fuego (brew install fuego), or pachi (compile yourself). With it, you can also learn a lot by making an AI play starting at a certain move, or making AI's play against each other.

You can also buy Goban from the app store to play GnuGo or Pachi (both bundled), but it is a bit buggy (and not really better than the older free version). They do respond to bug reports though so it sounds like they are actively working on it.

Start out playing 9x9 against GnuGo. Give yourself a 9-stone handicap, you should probably win. Take away handicap stones until you can win with a 3 stone handicap.

In general you don't want to play an AI at less than 3-stone handicap or you will learn bad habits.

At that point, play against GnuGo 19x19 with a 9-stone handicap. If you are a beginner around 20kyu, you will find it a challenge to win.

I've been practicing consistently for the past couple of months. I do problems on goproblems.com or from a few iPhone apps. I've played a couple of games against ranked bots on kgs and am ranked 15kyu there since I beat a popular 16kyu-ranked bot. KGS is inflated through so I'm probably around 20kyu, still a complete beginner. I beat GnuGo 19x19 at a 9-stone handicap but not quite yet at an 8-stone handicap.

Once you are able to beat GnuGo 19x19 at a lower handicap then you can start playing against Fuego or Pachi. But at that point you should also already be playing humans regularly - it's a very different playing style in that you'll come across clearly bad moves that you will have to learn to recognize and take advantage of.

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