> A good point to consider - is "God" actively trying > to confuse his > opponent and complicate things, or is he simply > playing objectively best > moves?
good question. if his goal is to win with zero handicap, all he has to do is pick a branch that ends with a win for, say, W. if he is starting from a branch without such a terminus, he has to try to move the game into such a branch. if it's a handicap game, then the question boils down to getting "over" to a winning branch from the tree whose initial state is completely different -- there are handicap stones on the board. more likely is that you play with high komi -- then the goal is to move "over" to a branch whose terminus is both a win and is by more than "komi" points. since there's no guarantee that you can get to such a branch, and since it's unlikely that the "absolute advantage" of W over B is more than 4 stones (or, say, 30 komi), this means that you have to try to get your opponent to make a mistake that will take you over into one of these "> komi + win" branches. likely the human opponent will play non-optimally in the first few moves. this will negate some of the komi. any move outside a "win w/o komi" branch will take you to a "lose by X w/o komi" branch, and "god" will know how to capitalize upon that to make up some more komi. this isn't enough to win the game, however, so "god" has to figure out how to maneuver the game over there. one approach might be to play moves where the greatest number of terminal nodes in that move subtree have winning scores in the "> komi" range. then you maximize the probability that an error (or series of errors) by the human player will result in a win for you. of course, once you're in a "win by > komi" branch, you're done. you just play it out with perfect refutations of every move. however, objectively the game is a win for only one player at the start, and the only way to overcome enough handicap (or komi) is to attempt to capitalize on errors (or inefficiencies, which in a completely solved game can be considered errors) made by your opponent. s. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Sponsored Link $200,000 mortgage for $660/ mo - 30/15 yr fixed, reduce debt - http://yahoo.ratemarketplace.com _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
