[computer-go] Technical Report on MoGo

[sylvain.gelly at m4x.org]

Hello,

> I'd be a bit more careful about the comparison with alpha-beta in
> section 2.3.  I believe that iterative deepening of alpha-beta is very
> common.  It can be argued that when iterative deepening is used, an
> early termination isn't very detrimental.  [...]
> Alpha-Beta is for practical reasons of course also an anytime algorithm. 
>[...] .My reaction when I read this
> statement was: "iterative deepening is not yet invented in the Go
> community".

Of course iterative deepening exists. But to me it does not make Alpha-Beta 
algorithm an "anytime" algorithm. First because the unit (one iteration) 
costs much more in alpha-beta. By "iteration" I mean that if you stop your 
program during an iteration, then it behaves as in the last iteration (the 
current iteration is lost). In MC/UCT, the iteration takes less than 1 ms. 
Second, and more importantly, the time increase of the iteration is huge in 
alpha-beta. The time to perform the search at depth k+1 is much higher than 
for depth k.

So for me the reasons we gave comparing to alpha-beta hold, even if you are 
right by saying that we should have mentionned iterative deepening.

Sylvain