Life In 19x19

During the previous 24h, L19 was unavailable for several hours due to database errors. An error message appeared with the suggestion to contact an admin but no email address of any admin was shown at the error message so one would not know how to report the occurrence of database errors when they ...

It is insufficient to consider values of followers and individual moves. It is also mandatory to verify whether long alternating sequences of several plays are worth playing successively to know from which followers to derive the initial move value.

I criticise every unverified local endgame ...

I do not know how Pachi does it but my study with KataGo has let me redefine joseki as "correct sequence for several standard openings judged by KataGo with sufficiently many playouts".

How are we to get John, Bill, and others


Bill stopped writing, IIRC, in summer 2021 presumably due to personal circumstances, which I suspect might be age- / health-related. It was two months before my publication of very much mathematical endgame theory, in which he would have been very ...

In the pre-AlphaGo-era, some professionals claimed that they would always beat God on H3, or was it H4? Anyway, I expect this prediction is in danger. OTOH, this is the chance for humans to beat AI down to H9 by a) exploiting novel trivial weaknesses of the neural net or b) complex life and death ...

Here are comments on part 1.

You study area deiri counting. Usually, one would use area miai counting.

For area miai counting, I (and others before me) have stated the principle "Usually, an area move value is 1 larger than a territory move value."

Unsurprisingly, for area deiri counting, you ...

Currently, when logged in, the Hamburger Menu "Quick links" contains "New Posts". One does not see this option when logged out. When logged in, initially the second row of the menu bar is "Board index . Life In 19x19.com General Topics . Announcements". When logged out, it is just "Board index".

I ...

Many thanks to everybody having brought L19 back to life! It is good that updated code makes hacking less likely.

if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.

For a game to be reinvented remotely, several game design decisions have to be made. Go (with some reasonably simple ruleset) requires a comparatively small number of such design decisions. Simpler games, such as ...

In the paper Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03335

AI learns from scratch on its own to create and prove problems of reasoning incl. deduction, abduction and induction for coding or mathematics in the manner of Alpha(Go)Zero or KataGo ...

MOST of the time we do not have the situation where A>B at a lower number of playouts but B>A at a very high number of playouts.

It is my observation in Katago study that it changes the relative order of most move candidates frequently for low numbers of playouts. A>B and B>A tend to change ...

MOST of the time we do not have the situation where A>B at a lower number of playouts but B>A at a very high number of playouts.

It is my observation in Katago study that it changes the relative order of most move candidates frequently for low numbers of playouts. A>B and B>A tend to change ...

Neural net computer go is not mathematical theorem proving, that is, we do not know whether a move is perfect play. Some practical search limit is needed, although one can fill one's RAM if a particular query is important. Go tournament players' thinking time are a different consideration and ...

For this purpose, start with one joseki corner and three single stone corners. To limit the amount of study, occupy the diagonally opposite corner with a 4-4 stone. In the two adjacent corners, each choose either a black or a white stone. Either such stone is 3-4 or 4-4 (because mostly others are ...

The basics of study with Katago concern calibration with komi, numbers of playouts, precision of values and study modes.

KOMI

For every ruleset, there is a komi so that initially the winning probability is about 50.0% and the expected score is about 0.0. One can set such a komi or accept other ...