Ingo Althöfer wrote:
During the last few days I have been meditating a lot about
the questiion whether taking into account the margin of
win into MCTS (UCT) may help or hurt.
I do not have a go program by my own, so for the moment
I have to believe what programmers are saying, namely
that "MCTS with margin of win as a criterion" gives worse
performance in play against other computer programs.
I think the computer go field has a lot of magical thinking like this.
Where a couple of different teams try out an idea, no one can get it to
work, and so everyone believes the idea is no good.
The truth is we don't know. Most of computer go is very empirical and
ad-hoc. We don't know why playing out a game randomly many times gives a
good approximation of winning chance (I'm sure I could design games
where this is not true). Using the margin and not just win/loss would
intuitively seem to mean a higher margin of error in this estimate, so
that a lot more play-outs are needed to take advantage of any added
information. But that would really just be another guess.
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