[computer-go] Some ideas how to make strong heavy playouts

[Mark Boon]

On 1-apr-08, at 17:37, Don Dailey wrote:
> That's partly why I'm interested in exploring "on the fly" leaning.
> Learning outside the context of the position being played may not have
> much relevance.

That would be most interesting indeed. I'd like to try but keep  
running into obstacles.

For example: at the moment I have just a handful of patterns. These  
patterns are important or 'urgent' if you like and they are already  
enough to overcome the slow-down caused by pattern-matching. At the  
moment I play a pattern randomly without distinction between them.

If I want to make anything 'learning' then I have to harvest patterns  
and somehow compute their importance / urgency. There are multiple  
ways to do that and Remi wrote a paper about one of them. At the  
moment I use the average length a pattern is on the board. Urgent  
patterns remain on the board for only a short while. Whether this is  
better or worse than Remi's way I don't know.

So I have now run the program for a few hundred games, adjusting the  
urgency of the patterns on a continuing basis. And the program got  
weaker! Selecting one at random is apparently superior to selecting a  
pattern based on urgency. This is why I started out with just a few  
patterns because it's easer to see what's happening. When I look at  
the urgencies computed they actually look very reasonable. So that's  
not the problem. When I think about what could cause this, the only  
thing I can imagine is, again, that play becomes more deterministic.

This is a recurring theme in my tests. Apparently it's something  
important that still escapes me and which I have to understand to  
make real progress.

Mark



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/attachments/20080402/75d827d0/attachment.htm