influence concensus map

[sorin]

if you are a dan, how accurate would you say the concensus map is?

While these are pretty pictures, I believe the whole concept is flawed and is misleading if you want to use it practically, since it is not even well defined what is "influence".

My main problem with these influence plots is that they miss the importance of cutting points and the ways to exploit them; a successful peep or cut (two basic ways to exploit a cutting point) can dramatically change the influence map in just a few moves.

[Uberdude]

https://www.reddit.com/r/cbaduk/comment ... influence/

[jaca]

i like the look of this one, which it's programmer says she made in 2 days! i infer it uses a version of Zobrist's "oil and water" analogy. oh, wait - it takes Leela's heatmap as an input, so it might be a combination of Leela and Zobrist
https://github.com/featurecat/Influencie

influencie.png (231.69 KiB) Viewed 17325 times

it doesn't solve tsumego or avoid having to read out cuts, but it does indicate which stones have solid eyespace and which do not.

it also shows me the value of thickness; white has territory, but black has influence.

and white's upper middle stones look like they are in trouble and their only place to develop is the centre. black's last move looks like he is preparing to make even more thickness facing the centre, which will make white's job of living even harder.

given what happened in the upper right, i don't think the position is from a pro game, but i suppose it could be... can someone who can look up databases of pro games tell us?

[Waylon]

given what happened in the upper right, i don't think the position is from a pro game, but i suppose it could be... can someone who can look up databases of pro games tell us?

The position is from a game Ota Yuzo vs. Yasuda Shusaku played in 1842.

[jaca]

Reading never was my strong point - i've only just now read https://www.lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16285, in which Lightvector makes a key observation:

..have the influence map be much more precise, for example correctly ignoring very-dead stones

Absolutely essential!

That seems to have been the cornerstone of gomap's "colour-control" - its algorithm doesn't quite achieve the stated intention of https://ssrn.com/abstract=2818149, but with a little modification, i think it could https://www.lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.p ... 79#p240279. It computes two qualitative strengths of connection (strong colour and weak shadow); strong doesn't necessarily imply immortality, but weak does imply being in danger - here there be dragones!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons

i would love to see an influence map that would help me focus my reading to make it more efficient. i find reading so fatiguing that i can't imagine why anyone would want to be a Go professional - so much work for so little money! i suppose it's like pro tennis - the top of the pyramid are the rich 1%, but all the 99% think they can get to be in the 1%! - otherwise, why would they bother?

luckily for lesser mortal golf pros, there are many hackers like me willing to pay for being told the bleeding obvious, so they can make a living just from teaching and selling golf paraphernalia, but that's not generally true for Go - Guan Juo has done it successfully, but she is exceptional.

Leela's Territory markup doesn't imply connection, for example the picture of it in post #1 shows black "territory" (= influence?) spreading all around the white stone at L6 which has an open route to the centre.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cbaduk/comment ... influence/ includes discussion of LZ-generated "phantom" influence derived from later placement of stones in LZ's search tree; since influence emanates from existing stones, any eatnowp06-computed influence that is not connected* to a trail of influence ultimately touching an existing stone of the same colour can be removed. That will make the resulting map look more natural.

* at least doubly-connected to influence that is at least as great as it is, since influence can't suddenly increase out in open space, even if two clouds of same-coloured influence happen to meet. Doubly-connected so you don't end up with lots of thin trails one point wide. and where clouds of differently-coloured influence meet, there should be a sort of "no man's land" between them. Plus... jeez, so many caveats! - you would have to do a 2-pass computation, the first pass identifies definitely dead stones, and the second pass pretends they are not there so they don't get in the way.

the concensus influence map in post #1, reproduced here for convenience, shows me that white bottom left group has enough eyespace to live (even though black has several forcing moves which would be useful ko threats later on), black bottom right is strong but not definitely alive, and last but not least, white bottom middle doesn't have enough potential eyespace to make 2 eyes, but we can see an escape route in the direction of Q10-R6 which is not impeded by black influence.

sabakimap.png (85.2 KiB) Viewed 17213 times

[gennan]

Those influence maps look pretty, but I don't really understand the purpose. To me, they look too crude to be useful for anything.
How does it help to detect who is leading or which areas are big and / or urgent?

[jaca]

Is there even such a thing as a sphere of Influence? If so, what is it? What does it mean?

Are all pretty things air-headed? Many do seem to be, but maybe looks are deceiving, for if you've got good looks, you can push a lot of buttons and pull a lot of strings and have an easy life without having to do much work - so maybe they're smarter than you think! I daresay Charles Darwin would have an opinion on this subject.

Physicists are in love with the beautiful equation - the simpler it is, the more beautiful. One of the most famous equations of all is exp(ixpi) = -1 although what that really means i'm not quite sure; does it have something to do with spheres?

John Keats reckoned that Beauty was Truth, and Truth, Beauty. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... recian-urn

Was he wrong?


---------------
Know that this worldly life is no more than playing games, and boasting among you, .. It is like abundant rain that produces plants and pleases the disbelievers. But then the plants turn into useless hay, and are blown away by the wind. (Al-Hadeed 57:20)

[Gomoto]

When I play I dont care about influence. My friends care about influence. I care about good moves. I win.

[Uberdude]

Speaking of influence, here's a nice example of LeelaZero invading deeper than a superficial judgement of what you might think is reasonable (if I played it I could well imagine a teacher telling me off for going too deep) based on the surrounding influence, but due to weakness in the influence it's actually surprisingly hard to punish.

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16198&p=240382#p240382

[Knotwilg]

Here I discuss the part of the OP not related to influence: moves 19, 20, 21 and variations.

[jaca]

When I play I dont care about influence. My friends care about influence. I care about good moves. I win.

LZ doesn't care about influence either... So she isn't one of Gomoto's friends?? i thought everybody loved LZ!

The human brain learns by forming new synapses, and modifying existing ones, a process not dissimilar to the way a DCNN modifies its weights.

LZ figures out how to modify its DCNN weights by reading all the way to the end of the game, seeing who won, and backing up that information in the context of all the other variations in the forest it has looked at.

Even if Gomoto doesn't read all the way to the end of the game at every move, he at least later on finds out whether he won or lost in actual play (a forest of width = 1).

So if he learns anything from his wins and losses, Gomoto could be said to learn Go in the same kind of way that LZ does, because (a) they both learn by modifying the strengths of synapses, and (b) they both don't care about influence.

https://github.com/gcp/leela-zero/blob/ ... #compiling says:
"Recomputing the AlphaGo Zero weights will take about 1700 years on commodity hardware."

Let F be the width of the forest of variations LZ explores.
Batman always wins - So, because he always wins against his friends, Gomoto must be (1700 x F) years old, or he has a brain (1700 x F) times bigger than mine.

Wait a minute! only cares about good moves, and we all know that the only good moves are the ones LZ makes, so is LZ!!!!!!

Those influence maps.. they look too crude to be useful for anything.
How does it help to detect who is leading or which areas are big and / or urgent?

An Example of Influence Map Utility: Visualising Tradeoffs between Obedient Gote and Wishful Tenuki

here are two rows of pictures of different white responses to black L4, to show the tradeoff between:
top row = blocking in gote at M4 to save a couple of stones and prepare the way for a later invasion/reduction of black's bottom right corner
bottom row = taking sente to gain influence elsewhere, eg D10

leela226.png (457.37 KiB) Viewed 12108 times

I do think that an influence map produced by having a top bot play itself from the current position 1,000,000 times could be quite educational, however

The Leela maps in the above picture are her Moyo markup. Her maps after thinking are a bit different from those before thinking. For M4, Leela changes her mind a little bit after looking at 2.5 million nodes... she made my cpu get hot, so for the second run (D10) i took a snapshot after only 700,000 nodes - short of a million, but the map was pretty stable by then; you can see it is more than a bit different from her first guess (which has black's lower group smothered by white's massive moyo!).

i like the look of what Influencie produces, as it corresponds with my own intuition - although this example might be a touch optimistic about connection strength of long jumps? Influencie lets you play around with Stone influence power; i may have had it turned up too high.

the 3 different mappers agree on a lot of things, but there are a few differences.

Influencie wins the beauty competition by a mile, and the size of her left black shadow agrees with the guess i made during my game review with W, so i am biased like hell in her favour (Oh, i remember now, i twiddled with her Stone Influence control until she did! ) - but the other two may have sounder judgement.

[Bill Spight]

Who says LZ doesn't care about influence? If LS cares about anything it cares about influence, that is, about the effect of stones on other stones and empty points.

[jaca]

If LS cares about anything it cares about influence, that is, about the effect of stones on other stones and empty points.

To us humans, it sure looks like she does, especially when she makes a fool of Monte-Carlo by rushing in like an angel where devils fear to tread.

But in fact - and you can check this with her programmers - when playing, LZ only thinks about who wins at the ends of each of her 1,000,000 imagined variations per move.

Just like , her eyes are constantly fixed solely upon the end of time, whilst her mind's eye interprets where she is now in terms of what she sees at the end of time.

But she never never never ever thinks about influence - or any other high-level cognitive concept, for that matter

... although i guess you could say that convolutions compute abstractions, so i can only say with confidence that she doesn't think about any other high-level human cognitive concept, which is going to make talking to her a bit tricky -

unless it turns out that some convolutions do have a correlation with human perception interpretation - things like being able to draw a line around an object in a scene, which face recognition and melanoma classification software is now able to do

- but at the moment, i don't see how LZ could employ the pixel abstraction technique to draw a line around a Go group, because what makes a Go group a group is not just its surface geometry.

[Bill Spight]

If LS cares about anything it cares about influence, that is, about the effect of stones on other stones and empty points.

To us humans, it sure looks like she does, especially when she makes a fool of Monte-Carlo by rushing in like an angel where devils fear to tread.

But in fact - and you can check this with her programmers - when playing, LZ only thinks about who wins at the ends of each of her 1,000,000 imagined variations per move.

What you have described is a MCTS player. LeelaZero has taken the next step.

[jaca]

What you have described is a MCTS player. LeelaZero has taken the next step.

Both A(Leela) and A0(LZ) read out to the end of each line, and then back up whether they saw a win or a loss; from that point of view, they are the same.

The key difference between them is that in both her training and playing, A0 does not consider randomly-generated moves - that's what makes her 7-league boots better than A, and what gives her a different playing-style, one that corresponds more to human received wisdom, except for her remarkable ability to invade, not to mention being able to read wider and deeper than all of China could working together if every single one of them were as strong as Ke Jie! Yes, there are 2 billion people in China, but not even he can read 300 moves deep.

i don't know abut you, but i'm not like Gomoto - i do try to think about influence, even if i don't get it quite right and/or don't use it in the best way possible. Like Manuel, "I try, Mister Fawlty - I try!!".