[computer-go] Gnugo vs commercial programs

[Arend Bayer]

On 1/11/07, Don Dailey <drd at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 07:52 -0500, Don Dailey wrote:
> > I agree that Gnugo was written in an absolute non-scalable style.
> > What
> > Gnugo does is continually upgrade from year to year.    They are
> > making
> > their program scale in a painfully manual way.
>
> I want to clarify what I said about Gnugo.   I'm not being critical of
> this style - it's perfectly feasible to just upgrade often and keep up
> in this way.


I agree with what you say. I think the main reason why, say, level 30 is
currently only marginally better than level 16 is that the life-and-death
search doesn't scale as written. The other reason that a program with no
global search as GNU Go will always suffer from some systematic evaluation
mistakes that won't go away no matter how deep you search in the local
fights. E.g. if GNU Go doesn't get it that a dragon is weak and needs
defense for strategical reasons, it won't get it at level 100 either (as the
analysis for that is mostly static).

Arend
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