[computer-go] Explanation to MoGo paper wanted.

[George Dahl]

I agree completely.  Anything the program needs to know about Go
(other than the rules)  it should figure out itself.  Obviously there
is some indirect knowledge coming from the programmer, but it should
be meta-go-knowledge.  As in how to discover go knowledge.  The
program I am working on now will be given as little Go knowledge
directly by humans as possible.  The way I will do this is by limiting
it to what I can personally figure out (I am 30+ kyu player, basically
I just know the rules).  It is playing games to generate data for some
initial experiments right now :).
- George

On 7/4/07, Don Dailey <drd at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-07-04 at 16:57 -0400, George Dahl wrote:
> > > Of course now we just had to go and spoil it all by imposing domain
> > > specific rules.  I have done the same and I admit it.    It would be
> > fun
> > > to see how far we could go if domain specific knowledge was
> > forbidden as
> > > an experiment.   Once patterns are introduced along with other
> > direct Go
> > > knowledge, it's still fun but it feels a bit "wrong", kind of like
> > > cheating.
> >
> > Is it still cheating if the program learns and discover's the patterns
> > itself?  Then isn't it just precomputing a few things?
>
> Of course it isn't cheating really,  but it seems more elegant to me if
> the computer is doing the figuring out, not the programmer.   Of course
> the programmer has to figure out how to write the program in the first
> place.
>
> But the idea of writing a Go program without any hand-coded Go knowledge
> is very appealing to me.   Of course, there HAS to be Go knowledge, even
> if it's figured out by the software.
>
> In Lazarus, I use several patterns for pruning moves.  But those
> patterns are not generated by ME.  Lazarus knows more about Go than I do
> and so Lazarus generated those patterns (off-line.)
>
> Ultimately, I would like programs to figure out "on the fly" what to do.
>
> It's fun to imagine how a program would work if God wrote it.   Would
> there be tons of hard coded knowledge built into it, or would it be a
> learning meta-system that had facilities for quickly finding out things
> for itself that it needed to know?
>
> - Don
>
>
>