Fred Hapgood wrote:
I have a really basic question about how MC works in the context of Go.
Suppose the problem is to make the first move in a game, and suppose we
have accepted as a constraint that we will abstain from just copying
some joseki out of a book -- we are going to use MC to figure out the
first move de novo. We turn on the software and it begins to play out
games. My question is: how does the software pick its first move? Does
it move entirely at random? Sometimes it sounds that way MC works is by
picking each move at random, from the first to the last, for a million
games or so. The trouble is that the number of possible Go games is so
large that a million games would not even begin to explore the
possibilities. It is hard to imagine anything useful emerging from
examining such a small number. So I'm guessing that the moves are not
chosen at random. But even if you reduce the possibilities to two
options per move, which would be pretty impressive, you'd still run out
of your million games in only twenty moves, after which you would be
back to picking at random again.
We don't know why it works. It's just a matter of empirical fact that
the win rate in random play-outs is a decent indicator of the strength
of a move. The math involved is likely to be hideous and probably of
little practical interest, and I don't know of anyone that has tried.
What am I missing??
I don't think you're missing anything at all.
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