Life In 19x19

So sad to hear - He offered a teaching game on DGS a decade ago that became a ~100 match jubango, and slowly working up from losing at 9 stones to even games was the background to my journey into go. I wish I'd had a chance to play him in his prime, he'd mostly retired from go by that point. It was ...

Thanks very muchfor the very interesting point! On table tennis, the coolest physical sport, I guess that would seem to me to be a flaw of the rating system no?

Elo-like algorithms can definitely have scaling issues between subpopulations that don't frequently play each other. I've seen it in ...

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Thanks, although I don't fully understand, since those issues are mostly addressed when absolute timing is in the context of a Semi-long-Total time limit? The opponent has less incentive to play useless moves and run down the clock than even in byo-yomi . . .

You could play 2,000 moves past ...

...But professionals are in a different situation. Playing go is their job, and they're playing not only for themselves, but for those who support them, their families, and for the patriotic among them, for their countries. To sidestep the rules and give the opponent a better chance to win because ...

Aesthetically, I prefer the sportsmanship mindset. "Two competitors met on the field of the goban and one exited victorious" is just a more pleasing narrative to my ear then "sure, so-and-so technically won, but they won in the incorrect manner! This other player is not at the top of the go world ...

...As a thought experiment, I find it difficult to think of Sin Chin-seo proudly publishing 'My Top 20 byoyomi ripoffs" to stand alongside the historical games of Shusaku. In which case there is something about such games which is not optimal.

Shusaku has a lot of games as black where he pulls ...

Excellent point lightvector, you are correct that a linear value network won't represent the idea that stones can be good or bad in combination with each other, and that that's closer to dhu163's point. In essence we're saying A XOR B is good (exclusive or), and one of the key observations during ...

Even with linear activation functions, it doesn't have to follow that (A is a good move) + (B is a good move) = (playing A and B is good). At the input to the network, we enter the state of the game. We then multiply the representation of that state against various weights and sum into the next ...

Saying "very old games" creates quite the wrong impression, unless you are masquerading as uberdude. Group tax was used well into the 20th century, in certain areas, and prior to that it was the norm in China. That suggests, incidentally, that there ought to have been some continuity in how it was ...

1/2 point seems to me to just express a preference against ties?

Why would dividing by 2 have any bearing on ties?

Ah, possibly this is an issue with the example: a 1 stone difference in score can be transformed to 1/2 by division by 2, or subtraction of 1/2.

Are you saying that if each side ...

A group tax is natural if there's an implicit or explicit ending phase of the game where you fill in the empty intersections in your territory. (As an aside, the use of group taxes in very old games makes me wonder whether the earliest forms of Go weren't played on a board closer to 9x9 where ...

It's called "Ultimate Tic Tac Toe" or "Super Tic Tac Toe", and it's been around for quite a while ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tic-tac-toe ). From the screenshot it looks like it's a normal implementation (getting 3 in a row on a local board wins that space on the larger board, aiming ...

Seems like this interacts awkwardly with seki? Whatever we set for N, eventually we play enough cycles that capturing a reasonably large group is illegal, at which point the other play can turn a seki into a self-atari and capture the opponents stones.

Presumably the other player would give up the ...

The proverb, of course, predates AI.

I think a human way to deal with this position as black is to play a bit far away on the side (play away from thickness). And then white would pincer (push black towards thickness) and black would form a base, and white would surround him towards the center, and ...

You are right about the prefrontal cortex. :) But the teenager as we know it is a modern phenomenon. Not to get into a nature vs. nurture debate. Both are important.



Our attitude towards teenagers is modern, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a distinctive developmental phase all along. And ...