Hi all, in the last few weeks I had moments where I did not feel well because of deficiencies of commercial go bots. I am in particular sensible (you may also say "spoiled") because I know how much better things were (and are) in the Chess world.
In particular, I use game playing software for the purpose of analysis. It seems that the special (positive) role of the "ChessBase" company in the Chess world is responsible for my opinion. ChessBase was founded in 1985 by two guys: the programmer Matthias Wuellenweber and the PR man Frederic Friedel. The only field of the company was the development of software for Chess (no other games; no other fields of software). It turned out to be a very important aspect that Mr. Friedel did (and does) a superb job in creating contacts with top Chess players: Very early Garry Kasparov (World Champion in those days, 1986) got involved and presented his use of the software in PR events. Other top players using and praising ChessBase software were - Vishy Anand - Nigel Short - the Polgar sisters - John Nunn and even former World Champion Boris Spasski (asking Friedel to "fill my Samowar" when he needed new portions of databases). In Go, the situation is rather different: so far not a single really strong player is known to work with commercial Go software (Fan Hui is an exception, but he works with AlphaGo only which is not publicly available). Is there a chance that this will change soon? High-end users would definitely encourage companies to improve their go programs - and encourage other Go players to use the software in nontrivial ways. Ingo. PS. Another aspect is that the correspondence Chess scene helped to improve Chess programs as tools for analysis. Unfortunately, the correspondence Go scene is negligible. (One of the few exceptions is 9.5-dan Gerhard Knop on LittleGolem.net, who was 4-kyu only in over-the-board play.) _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
