Questions I would ask God about the game of Go • Hacker News Board

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#131

Post by afthonos » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

elcomet wrote: post #130

afthonos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go has points. An opening move is better than another if, given perfect play thereafter, you end up with more points.

But are those points counted in tournaments, or are they just counted to know who won the game ? So, if you have a very clear path of how to win by 1 point, or a risky way to win by 10 points, does it make sense to try the risky path ?

They are not officially counted, but they are often used as an informal indication of strength difference among players.

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#132

Post by CydeWeys » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #121

jefftk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I implemented the Tromp-Taylor rules ( https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computer_Go/Tromp-Taylor_Rules ) which have "A turn is either a pass; or a move that doesn't repeat an earlier grid coloring." Since it doesn't consider whose turn it is to move in whether a grid coloring is repeated, it won't allow suicide.

The prohibition on matching any earlier state of the board makes playing the game significantly more complex in reality, but not in terms of how many bits it takes to describe the rules. Have you considered defining the complexity in terms of the number of bits required to implement the game, and not just the ruleset? Go requires a potentially very large list of past board states.

The amount of memory used in the execution of the program doesn't seem as important, and biases against games played on larger boards for no real reason. At the extreme end, you'd say that Conway's Game of Life takes infinite memory and is thus of infinite complexity because it occurs on an unbounded board, yet, the actual rules are very small and simple to implement.

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#133

Post by Cpoll » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 2:27 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #53

grawprog wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Shogi, Checkers, or Stratego weren't human games I wouldn't be surprised to learn them from aliens. Why do all theories about aliens start with the implication that they're similar enough that they developed the way we did, they think like we do, have similar senses, brain structure and locomotion. Any aliens that have evolved to any kind of level of intelligence would have done so under the conditions specific t…

> Why do all theories about aliens start with the implication that they're similar enough that they developed the way we did, they think like we do, have similar senses, brain structure and locomotion For the same reason the laws of nature are the same around the universe. Logic is not really that negotiatable, so thinking creatures will end up with the same kind of logic as us, even if they look differently. All for…

> For the same reason the laws of nature are the same around the universe.

I wonder how much is cultural though? Go depends on a 2d grid, but is it possible that some alien Grade 9 math tends to use, say, distance and angle from origin instead of x, y? In that case the intuition for Go might not be there because they don't use grids, even though the math is ultimately the same.

Or a culture that likes to use hexagons for their board games (hexagonal Go tends to be more shallow than grid-based Go).

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#134

Post by monkeypizza » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 1:23 AM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #114

tunesmith wrote: post #106

One question I never found an answer for was what AlphaGo thought komi should be. Since Black goes first, it has an advantage of x stones. But if Black is given a handicap of 2 stones (placed on the board before play), white then goes first. Since AlphaGo plays itself, it could have been set to play itself with a handicap, such that the win rate was 50%. I want to know what that handicap would have been, because woul…

I agree. There are many interesting questions Deep Mind could have answered about both go and chess. I am still bitter they didn't take a few days more to run experiments of great interest for fans of both games. For chess the simplest one would be to take most popular positions from top level human play and let A0 play Stockfish from that (say 10 times from every of 100 positions). Then do the same for self-play and…

Open source research is continuing.

There are a few open source implementations of the alphago algorithm and some new work being done to improve it for go. Check out lizzie, which is a nice front end to leela zero.

https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17095