* If my ego were hurt by the fact that Mogo scales better, I * could easily construct a theory that explained it away. This is what we * tend to do when we don't want to believe something. That's what I * think is being done with the argument that improvement against computers * doesn't translate to improvement against humans. Sort of a false * modesty - when I beat a much stronger player once I made excuses for * him, my brain was not ready to fully accept the win.
Is this a stab at me? ; ) I think my ego being hurt is less of a factor in my opinion than you say but we tentatively agreed to disagree so I won't bring that whole mess back up. I think there is evidence and statistics that can be interpreted in different ways by different people. I wouldn't think that Occam's Razor really can be applied here to make your solution the winner. "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." I don't know that all other things are equal in this case.. and it sort of seems that Occam's Razor could be used to squash opposing opinions a little prematurely. For example.. if we were back in the 1200's, many people would say that the Earth is flat because it looks flat and if it were not flat.. you would fall off if you went to the other side. Given the available information at the time.. a theory of gravity and other various applicable theories would be quite a bit more complicated than the flat earth model.. and would probably be rejected since the simplest solution with the evidence at the time would point to the Earth being flat. * I'm willing to be proved wrong but we all know how * difficult it is to get reliable evidence from human played games. It * really would require thousands if not millions of fairly played human * computer games at a huge variety of controlled levels and conditions to * make sense of this. That could be true if you are trying to prove with great confidence or to get an accurate model of the scalability... but I think a decent answer will be given with a much smaller sample of games. If you got a group of 5 pros... and they each played 10 games vs. the computer at various strengths.. you could quite possibly get data that would let you know the general scalability.. it wouldn't be the final model that works in all cases.. but it would at least give the go world an idea of how powerful these programs are when scaled against humans. If the computer did very well... I think that alone would wake the human go playing world up... and they would not be so quick to dismiss computer go. Certainly.. if we were able to scale up to the level that is presumed to be required to surpass all humans... 10 games at this level.. with the computer obliterating the human every time would be reasonable evidence that scalability will own humans. Kind of like with Chess.. there weren't a terribly large number of games between the blue machines and Kasparov. It felt to me that the world in general accepted that computers dominate humans in chess after those two matches. That is debatable.. but I think many people's opinions were changed just by those two matches.
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