[computer-go] Anchor Player

[alain Baeckeroot]

Le vendredi 22 décembre 2006 16:03, Don Dailey a écrit :
> So it becomes far more important to play the opponent, not the board.
> All your hopes and dreams depend on your opponent, not the brilliancy
> of your moves (all of which lose.)

This is a problem of knowledge and estimation. In the beginning of 9 handi
game , the ration of stones is 1 white / 9 black, so position looks
bad for W. But knowledge says : play normal moves, wait and see.

Just play the board is a winning strategy if handicap is correct.
Play opponent = play trick moves, overplay, this is usually losing strategy.

> 
> So it makes a great deal of sense to understand your opponent and
> to play in such a way that your opponent is more likely to go wrong.
> I'm not aware of any computers that think in these terms.   However,
> humans do!
It seems that strong chess programs play like this, or are tuned like
this for a specific opponent.

> 
> I remember seeing a game annotated where a good player beat a program
> with some huge number of handicap stones.   The annotations made
> it very clear that the human player was far more concerned with
> his opponent than the board.
This is true for exceptional games, where the aim is to demonstrate
how stupid the go programs are :(
http://gailly.net/go.html in section "Computer Go" contains many links
to human/computer games with huge handi (up to 29 Martin Mueller/ManyFaces)

But no human rated near 6-9 k (like GNU Go, Aya, ManyFaces, HandTalk ...)
could lose a game against a 5dan with 29 handi !

> 
> I'm fairly confident that in low handicap games where there is not
> a great deal of strength difference between players,  this can be 
> ignored without too many side effects.   The same issues I 
> describe exist, but we may be able to safely ignore them.   I can't
> say that for sure since I am not a strong player.
> 
> - Don
>  

Alain