Comments on: The Mystery of Go

By: Candide III

Candide III — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 18:45:39 +0000

“All I know now is that you came here with that stupid Duke who… Aiee-e-e! Woman! I care not if you kill me! He was honorable and brave, but it was stupid to put himself in the way of the Harkonnen fist!”

Silence.

Presently, Jessica said: “He had no choice, but we’ll not argue it.”

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:53:11 +0000

Pseudopolymath notes that Go skills may not transfer well:

My one intuition from playing a little Go in high school is that it teaches you recognize a non-winning position and abandon that before losses mount. Looking at Japan in WWII, playing the game doesn’t translate that skill to real life.

By: Candide III

Candide III — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 11:03:50 +0000

It means that there is an algorithm, runnable on existing hardware, that wins (if its opponent makes a mistake) or draws every time against any opponent.

By: Boonton

Boonton — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 01:29:52 +0000

Has checkers really been solved? What does that mean exactly?

By: Candide III

Candide III — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 04:25:19 +0000

There they go about Crazy Stone again. When it wins in at least a 4-game match against the same pro, rather than one-offs with different ones, then I’ll take notice. Crazy Stone’s “style”, such as it is, is sufficiently unlike any human that adjustments are required, and the authors of the program don’t give pros the opportunity. Of course the situation is hopeless from the game-theoretical business point of view, because both parties have no incentives to organize a real test. Program authors want good press releases to obtain further funding, professionals want the playing fees to keep rolling in. Professionals usually manage to lose by half a point when they play amateurs for money, and they seldom play amateurs seriously, at least in Japan. By the way, if you want really first-class Go pros these days, you go to South Korea and China, not Japan.

By: Robb Seaton

Robb Seaton — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 22:06:15 +0000

A weakness in chess is that there is too much knowledge about the openings, and it is constantly increasing.

Bobby Fischer's chess variant deals with this problem.

By: Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 19:30:49 +0000

“At any rate many expert chess players, including Emanuel Lasker, who was World Chess Champion for 28 years, have held that Go is more interesting than chess, and it is not easy to think of any third game that is a serious rival.”

I nominate poker or bridge.

They represent another category of games:

From a certain perspective go and chess are the same type of game — non-random, public information games. Poker and bridge are hidden information games with a random element (randomness and hidden information go together in a game for obvious reasons).

By: Neovictorian23

Neovictorian23 — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 18:18:36 +0000

Digitally recreating the entire universe is a solvable problem with a limited possibility space.

By: Rollory

Rollory — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 18:00:52 +0000

From the article:

At the beginning of a chess game, White has twenty possible moves. After that, Black also has twenty possible moves. Once both sides have played, there are 400 possible board positions. Go, by contrast, begins with an empty board, where Black has 361 possible opening moves, one at every intersection of the 19 by 19 grid. White can follow with 360 moves. That makes for 129,960 possible board positions after just the first round of moves.

That about sums it up. Chess is a solvable problem and has in large part been solved (checkers has been completely solved). Go is also a solvable problem; the difference is that the computational ability required to solve it is orders of magnitude larger. Which does not make it impossible.

Among the many SF short stories I read as a kid, I remember there was one (must have been from 1950s or so) where a race of alien robots was talking about how there was this planet that had to be avoided at all costs because there was a terribly infectious logic problem that tended to permanently crash any of their kind that encountered it because it was so engrossingly difficult, and the only information available was the names of the components: King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn.

Today of course that story is laughably naive. Assuming technological civilization doesn’t collapse, there’s no reason Go can not eventually suffer the same fate as chess. It’s just a matter of doing the computations – because it is a solvable problem with a limited possibility space.