> You clearly don't understand the principles of alpha/beta pruning. It > is an "admissible" technique which means it guarantee's the same result > as searching the entire tree, but only requires a very tiny subset of > the entire tree.
Okay... congratulations... you are right... if you are able to generate a completely pruned tree using alpha/beta pruning... you don't have to generate the whole game tree. But exactly how are you going to do this? In chess... you can look 9 moves in and quickly evaluate if a branch is looking good or is looking bad (wow... you just lost a rook three moves in). It seems you can't really do this until pretty deep in the tree for go. Plenty of moves would look bad 20 moves deep.. but would turn out to be good 80 moves later. How can you know if a move is good or not until you move towards the end of a branch? Isn't this just a little computationally expensive? You need some sort of early evaluation function... and we don't seem to have that yet. It seems that alpha/beta pruning hit a roadblock a long time ago in go. Now we have MC... which as you increase the number of samples.. you start to get closer to an equivalent alpha/beta. But... there are still huge groups of samples that are not checked... and if you want to somehow prove you have the best move... how will you do it? Will you make the sample size equivalent to the number of possible samples? How will you do this practically? You can only state with a certain confidence that you did make the best move and this would be bound by our computational resources. It is pretty obvious that go has many computationally difficult sub problems. MC is a shortcut... and we don't know yet how it will perform in the wild. > Let's say you have 381 possible first moves and you find that the first > one you look at wins the game by 6.5 points. That is a huge if. Man.. I would love the algorithm you did that with (or the hardware). You really looked at one opening move.. and realized that it won by 6.5 points, unconditionally? Was this somehow considered practical? Or are we on a machine that has as much time and space as you want? I don't know... most of your emails are pretty condescending and you tend to only respond to a point that you see a weakness in. In fact, I am not sure if you have made any kind of concession towards my viewpoint. So far... I got a nice illustration about how your data is a duck and a nice explanation that seemed tailored to a three year old. I have yet to be given your sources of information. Plenty of times.. I hear it is proven scalable to perfect play... and the only paper I can imagine you are talking about is the bandit problem paper. After I read it... it seems that it is not used as an argument of practicality.. which is the way you used it. It is used as an argument of correctness. I also heard of overwhelming empirical evidence that this will scale to beat humans. Someone else sent me your personal experiments on 9x9 and 13x13. I do not really see how this obviously means it will scale in the same way vs. a human (it doesn't, after all, include any humans). I don't think you could make that kind of statement in an academic paper based on the data. But quite clearly.. to hear you tell it.. it is the most obvious thing imaginable and only a fool wouldn't see how clear it is. Your duck drawing was really clever.. but I still don't see your overwhelming evidence. Maybe I am stupid. There is no doubt it is successful, I never denied that. I just questioned whether it is the panacea of go programming and all we need is hardware. I thinking questioning a potential problem is a bit different from declaring that it has a problem. Your burden of proof argument could lie with you. I would wager that a large portion of the go/computer go world think computers ain't gonna do it anytime soon. If you look at the game records... computer go hasn't been doing so well. So now you present new evidence but it is in a very early stage. Perhaps it is you that would need to prove your belief.. not me. Of course... we are on a mailing list so you don't have to prove anything to me. But earlier you made it quite clear that you don't need to prove anything... that I have the complete burden of proof. If you published a paper on this topic.. does that mean that the burden of proof against your paper lies with the whole academic community? I would hope that you would have to defend your paper... instead of everyone else having to prove you wrong. (You very easily could be right.... but I questioned your certainty). Unless you want to more calmly discuss this... and are willing to accept some sort of possibility that you are not 100% correct... I don't think we need to continue this. It is increasing both of our blood pressures and I am sure many people on the list find the whole discussion annoying. And feel free to send one more rant my way... I won't respond unless it is civil.. but at least you can feel I didn't have the last word. To anyone who did find this whole deal annoying.. I apologize.
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