Played another game against a pro, karroyjack Zhao Yifei 3p goratings #622. LZ #198 embarassed itself with a ladder delusion. And it wasn't just due to low playouts, it appears to me 198 has got worse at ladders versus older 40-block networks!


For move 49 198 wants to play s15, it doesn't want to ladder the white stones (which doesn't work), but seem to think white WILL think the ladder works and thus needs to tenuki this sente move to prevent the ladder, meaning black can then capture the cutting stones in the corner to make all his groups safe. A very short horizon effect? 194 on the other hand wants to defend at q18 for a long time, but it too goes for s15 after 25k playouts.

Crossing eyes and dotting tees:

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There is one human race.
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The Adkins Principle:

At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?

— Winona Adkins

Highlight of this game (network #199, 20s) was the deep invasion/reduction at move 40. LZ thumbs its nose at the black influence (top right joseki is rare because usually you don't want to give black the strength of the ponnuki even though it allows you to capture on the right side and keep corner) and lives with ease. I added quite a few variations of how LZ as white would deal with my various attempts (with LZ's help) as black to attack/kill it. LZ says it's best for black to just admit it's hard to punish and that territory's gone, tenuki to c9, let white spend another move to strengthen it and get another tenuki. Also 130-132 a nice example of "raising a flag" to create centre eyespace.

Move 64: 84% winrate. It's so hard even for top pro to calculate the chance of winning at this early stage.

Yes, the ability of these bots to detect a half point win 200 moves away is amazing.

Played another pro, "friedrice", Taiwanese-born Japanese pro Han Zenki 8p, goratings #490 at 3049. LZ #200 running on my 1060 GPU at 3 x 20 seconds was usually getting 1 or 2 thousand playouts per move but more when sequences went as expected (up to 10k or so). I didn't do any promising blue-circle jiggery-pokery, though there were a few instances where soon after playing a move LZ decided another was better (e.g. e12 over d12, r3 over k8). It beat him easily, impressive direction of play and haengma in a big fight from the first unsettled joseki. g4 was a sharp move which set up weakness in black's shape and would have preferred him to g5 defend and allow white d9 hane at head of two. The cheek of ignoring l5 was another highlight and subsequent sabaki, the way of living on lower side and right corner gave white moves like o5, p7 peep, j5 cut which meant it was confident to save the middle stones when he attacked at l9. This game was a good illustration of how LZ really doesn't like to connect on dame, and likes to force the opponent to connect on dame (but he refused and played p2 so LZ rescued the middle stones). LZ was at 96% by move 100 and it would have been about 25 points win if it went to counting (resign at 162). So still not played a top pro, but shows that LZ on mid-range hardware is a lot stronger than this level of pro (at least when no ladder delusion).