5 ms·

The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win

26 points by mr_golyadkin 12y ago

zweiterlinde 12y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732393
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wglb 12y ago
  This one is actually the third submission: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22the-world-of-computer-go%22#!/story/forever/0/%22the-world-of-computer-go%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22the-world-of-computer-go%22#!/s...
cjbprime 12y ago
For a dissenting opinion, see my blog post from 2012: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-very-good-at-the-game-of-go/ http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-ver...
- gnuvince 12y ago
  Very interesting read, thanks for posting it! I'm not really familiar with that domain, could you tell me whether it's possible that the reason Go bots are not as strong as chess bots (in relation to humans) is simply because chess is a much more popular game that, and more time and effort has gone into making those AI stronger? Go is touted as having a much larger search space than chess, but that probably means that it's harder for humans as well, no?
  - cjbprime 12y ago
    You're welcome. Popularity might well be some of it, but I think that effect's worn off by now. I think the main reason has to do with score estimation. With chess, you can say that a queen is worth 8 points and a rook is worth 5 and a bishop's worth 3, and get a quick idea of who's winning a game. In Go, every piece has the same value, and whether a stone is useful depends on which other stones it's connected to, and whether those stones are going to be alive at the end of the game. So just to work out whether you're winning, you have to be able to do search all the way to the end of the game and work out who wins! And computers have been getting that process wrong until recently. The extra search space doesn't make Go harder for humans too, because humans play both Chess and Go very differently to computers. A human never tries to calculate the value of a million possible moves, so the question of how many million possible moves there are to search through just isn't relevant to a human. Humans play both Chess and Go largely using pattern recognition and insight in a way that computers are not currently able to model.
jimmaswell 12y ago
What a rambling purple-prose article. Why can't it just cut to the point? Why should I care what the people were wearing? Why does that merit a paragraph of description?

26 points by mr_golyadkin 12y ago

zweiterlinde 12y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732393

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wglb 12y ago
This one is actually the third submission: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22the-world-of-computer-go%22#!/story/forever/0/%22the-world-of-computer-go%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22the-world-of-computer-go%22#!/s...

cjbprime 12y ago

For a dissenting opinion, see my blog post from 2012: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-very-good-at-the-game-of-go/ http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-ver...

gnuvince 12y ago
Very interesting read, thanks for posting it! I'm not really familiar with that domain, could you tell me whether it's possible that the reason Go bots are not as strong as chess bots (in relation to humans) is simply because chess is a much more popular game that, and more time and effort has gone into making those AI stronger? Go is touted as having a much larger search space than chess, but that probably means that it's harder for humans as well, no?
- cjbprime 12y ago
  You're welcome. Popularity might well be some of it, but I think that effect's worn off by now. I think the main reason has to do with score estimation. With chess, you can say that a queen is worth 8 points and a rook is worth 5 and a bishop's worth 3, and get a quick idea of who's winning a game. In Go, every piece has the same value, and whether a stone is useful depends on which other stones it's connected to, and whether those stones are going to be alive at the end of the game. So just to work out whether you're winning, you have to be able to do search all the way to the end of the game and work out who wins! And computers have been getting that process wrong until recently. The extra search space doesn't make Go harder for humans too, because humans play both Chess and Go very differently to computers. A human never tries to calculate the value of a million possible moves, so the question of how many million possible moves there are to search through just isn't relevant to a human. Humans play both Chess and Go largely using pattern recognition and insight in a way that computers are not currently able to model.

jimmaswell 12y ago

What a rambling purple-prose article. Why can't it just cut to the point? Why should I care what the people were wearing? Why does that merit a paragraph of description?