71–80 of 134 posts
On a semi-unrelated note, is there a decent English-speaking online Go community anywhere? I would like to try my hand at playing but I can't find anything along the lines of FICS, or even a decent-looking client for Android.
Can someone recommend a decent board and set of stones, that don't feel too shabby yet don't cost an arm and a leg?
On a semi-unrelated note, is there a decent English-speaking online Go community anywhere? I would like to try my hand at playing but I can't find anything along the lines of FICS, or even a decent-looking client for Android.
On a semi-unrelated note, is there a decent English-speaking online Go community anywhere? I would like to try my hand at playing but I can't find anything along the lines of FICS, or even a decent-looking client for Android.
www.gokgs.com is the server that's probably biggest in the English speaking world. The desktop client is Java based, there is an Android client, and we're waiting for an HTML client (it's in closed Alpha). There are several other servers that cater more to Asian players, but you can certainly play on them. There is also online-go.com, which is web-based. It has real-time games, but the majority of games on the server…
Here is Crazy Stone's account on KGS (a reasonably popular go server). http://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=crazystone That AI is 6d on KGS.
CrazyStone isn't too far behind.
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Yeah, this is my thought. It seems, for example, that precisely calculating the optimal strategy would be quite tenable on a 9x9 board, because the problem space is so small. On a 19x19 board, the space is absolutely immense. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference with humans, though, because we are so adept at pattern-matching. So it seems like while a larger board would certainly make things more difficult to a…
Solving go on a 5x5 board takes something like 2hours on a modern PC. So, optimal play for 7x7 may be within reach but 9x9 is much much harder. PS: "Center opening results in Black taking the entire board. First play on the edge results in White taking the entire board."
Combinatorically, Go is considered pretty much the most complex game in existence, and computer go programs have been historically weak, so this seems to be quite an achievement (despite that it was against 4-stone-handicapped master passed his prime). One thing I wonder, though, if computers ever catch up to humans at Go, could we simply expand the board size a few spaces, thus dramatically increasing the problem sp…
“4-stone handicap” can seem odd or artificial to non-Go players, but it is a classic way of balancing a game between players with known different levels: because of the complexity of the game, mastery expands wide, and it is rare to find a player exactly at one’s level. The gameplay changes a bit when starting at an advantage, but not significantly. For PR reasons, AI advances are usually measured with matches against star players; that handicap tradition allows AI advances to be measured more finely -- and I guess have a count-down, more appealing that the ‘not beaten yet/OK, we are done’ dichotomy of Deep Blue vs. Kasparov.
On a semi-unrelated note, is there a decent English-speaking online Go community anywhere? I would like to try my hand at playing but I can't find anything along the lines of FICS, or even a decent-looking client for Android.
Someday I'd like to make it more feature complete, such as adding accounts and multiple rooms, but since I just started a new job I won't have time for a while!
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> You can inflate the game tree complexity just by switching from single-precision to double-precision, but that doesn't really make the game any harder. I think that absolutely makes the game significantly harder, just like playing Go on a smaller board is easier than Go on a larger board.
Only if you're brute-forcing the game. Something like smaller time steps and more precise positioning for a RTS will usually only slightly alter the optimal strategies, rather than change them to be unrecognizable, because the size of units and buildings and obstacles won't have changed so things like route finding will be basically unchanged in result and execution time. Almost everything being optimized would be lo…
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There are plenty of deterministic games more complex than Go, even turn-based ones. But Go is still a clear outlier due to its age and the simplicity of its rules - it's completely obvious how to enumerate the game tree. Things like a real-time strategy game aren't really a fair comparison, since they are designed to approximate a continuous game space-time as opposed to the discrete board and moves of Go. You can in…
> You can inflate the game tree complexity just by switching from single-precision to double-precision, but that doesn't really make the game any harder. I think that absolutely makes the game significantly harder, just like playing Go on a smaller board is easier than Go on a larger board.