[computer-go] Congratulations to GNU and to MoGoBot19!

[Don Dailey]

By the way, byo-yomi is not a very logical system.  It has the
characteristic that you are penalized for playing quickly.   If you play
quickly the time should be credited to you.    But byo-yomi seems more
interested in forcing a player to play at a steady pace and doesn't
allow much control over how you spend your time.   

Even byo-yomi is less friendly to humans (and more favorable to
computers) than something like the Fischer clock because humans are very
skillful at allocating time where needed.   A skilled human can use a
LOT of time to advantage if it's a special position that requires a
carefully thought out move - computers are very poor at this.  

So if I were a computer, I would prefer time control systems in this
order:

  1. sudden-death  (fixed time for complete game, the faster the
better!)

  2. byo-yomi   (illogical for everyone - better for computers than
humans)

  3. Fischer clock  (terrible for computers - good for humans)

Sudden death of course is by far the number one choice for computers.

- Don



On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 07:41 +0900, Darren Cook wrote:
> >> I thought the point being made was that the games were played without
> >> byo-yomi. 
> > 
> > Isn't that a time control not usually played in serious games?
> 
> No, the other way round: all serious ama or pro games (at least, that I
> know of) are played with byo-yomi. In the two-day tournaments the
> byo-yomi is 1 minute per move, and something like the last 100 moves of
> the game are usually played in it. The NHK speed go TV tournament is 30
> seconds/move (throughout the whole game, but with 10 minutes of extra
> time they can use when they need to think more about a move).
> 
> Darren
> 
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