Thanks for the link to the CMU CNN paper, Steven, which was very interesting. I noted with some pleasure that they included a fovea stream - although maybe that is a bit of a misnomer, as whereas animal foveas roam around the image, building (i think) a symbolic structural description of the picture, theirs was fixed in the middle.
I wonder whether a roaming fovea CNN could be a successful "group connectedness" classifier? I can envisage the fovea being moved around by a higher-level routine that uses a symbolic description of the game situation to identify which areas/groups it wants it to investigate. Incidentally, i'm unconvinced that including an age of stone feature is valuable, because although the future is dynamic, the past is set in stone (sic); Go teachers sometimes talk about tewari analysis to demonstrate when an old stone becomes inefficiently placed by a certain line of play. As to romantic notions of human superiority, i personally feel that such opinions are not so much romantic as hubristic - or perhaps paranoid! However, i have to admit that in 1979 i was a false prophet when i claimed "the brute-force approach is a no-hoper for Go, even if computers become a hundred times more powerful than they are now" [Brown, D and S. Dowsey, S. The Challenge of Go. *New Scientist* 81, 303-305, 1979.]. Back in those days, i never imagined that something so blind as Monte-Carlo would become more perceptive than even my weak eye, let alone being able to defeat a pro (albeit with a 5-stone handicap), as Zen just did on KGS. By the way, i've long since lost my paper copy of my paper; you have access to an academic library - would you be able to retrieve and scan a copy of it, just for my nostalgia? -- personal website <http://sites.google.com/site/djhbrown2/home>
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