If you're ahead and go for a bigger win, generally you're just risking more to gain more when you don't need more.
there is *absolutely* no advantage from a game-theoretical point of view to try to win by more than 0.5 points. and in practice, it's generally not a great idea to try to win by any more than you absolutely have to. this goes toward the game-goal of the first person to really explain the game to me, who said that both sides should strive for a balanced game. a 0.5 pt. game is a perfectly played game. which is not exactly the western view of winning. and which, i agree, gives far too much credit to MC players, since they roughly emulate this line of play "purely" by accident. however, most people won't go so far as to ignore an unreasonable invasion where you *let your opponent live inside your territory* even if it wouldn't add up to enough to cause them to lose the game. it's pride, or something. if you can prove* that you can stop an invasion with no risk to yourself, people will generally play to stop it, although to be fair, if you knew you didn't have to, by ignoring it you are not treating it like a huge source of ko threats for your opponent, which is a good thing. they might not really be ko threats, if they don't add up to enough for you to lose if you win the ko fight by ignoring them. which is part of the tricky nature of a ko. measuring the size of the threat. one way that people will often play that i think has no basis in an attempt to win, but which is simply human nature, is to occasionally fight a ko fight to the bitter end regardless of whether it will affect the outcome of the game. you'll see games that are decided by 10-15 points with 30 moves worth of ko threats to determine who gets the extra fraction of a point. this may be under the assumption that, "if i win the fight, i definitely won't lose the game, but if i lose the fight, maybe there's something that i didn't see that could cause me to lose the game" or it could just be kiai. but neither seem game-theoretically justifiable. for some reason this gets great cheers from the audience, whereas a computer player sacrificing 10 stones unnecessarily seems horrifying. even with very, very good computer players, i think that with sufficiently tight time controls we will always see this happen, since it's an easy decision to make, and much better than losing on time. s. *i.e. that any unconditionally alive group with a border of single-colored stones should be able to prevent any freshly invading stones from living. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
