Quoting David Fotland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
My point with the file I attached is not that it's a difficult position.
These fights are incredibly easy if you just add a few dozen lines of code
to count liberties correctly. To me it's as if a weak chess player says, my
program doesn’t need to understand basic pawn structure evaluation. It
looks really complicated. I'll just search faster than you. There is some
basic knowledge that is not complex and is very useful.
I think we are having a confusion of what a MC-program can do or not do here.
The strongest MC-programs does a lot of things of the type "a few dozen lines
of code", and without them they would be weak even on small boards. Valkyria
does some tactical things that has improved its tactics considerably and there
are much more to be done. On your position it insisted on resigning or passing
depending on who played first so I have to look at that more carefully.
In real
games on small boards though it often handle semeais and ko fights
surprisingly
well. But it is probably true that in an artificial position with multiple
sekis and semeais a search based strategy may fail becuase all local fight
multiply many minor difficulties unless there is dedicated code which removes
the need for search. Right now Valkyria has no code whatsoever that detects
seki, so it is extremely vulnerable to such positions if it cannot be saved by
shallow UCT-search.
MC-programs are thus not necessarily void of hardcoded go knowledge. The trick
is to find which knowledge should be added dependent on the tradeoff with
speed. Almost everytime I add something slightly complex to Valkyria it
becomes
5 percent slower and because of the scaling properties of MC-search such
slowdowns have a large impact on the playing strength when they add up.
So from my point of view I think I have found some easy ways to improve the
playing strength a lot, but I reached the point where I cannot longer in
advance predict that a new feature will actually make the program stronger, so
it has become a process of many trials and many errors.
-Magnus
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