I'll still prefer the click of stone on wood though. Computer Go just doesn't do it for me. If that means that a busy year is a half-dozen games... well that still beats playing Go on the computer, even against a human.
So, if someone creates an "AI" that has intelligence different to human intelligence... it wouldn't be AI?
I've never seen a discussion of AI that REQUIRED them to mimic humans. In fact, the unintelligent neural network approach to antenna design (artificial, with NO implication of intelligent search for a solution) produces designs explicable to physics, which work (your cell phone may well rely on one), but no-one knows how they get from this design to that. Their non-intelligence is different to human intelligence, but in some ways stronger.
Figure out exactly how so few board combinations need to really be evaluated by people in order to play with high competency, and replicate *THAT*.
Good luck with that. I mean, people have only been trying that for...
The first computer-Go programmer I met and played against was in 1984. He was trying to do that, on IIRC a BBC Micro with 128kb of RAM.
I've been following the subject since then. Shockingly, you describe EXACTLY the process that most people have tried to implement. It was only about a decade ago that their progress crept ahead of my playing level. But since I only manage a half-dozen games a year on average, I've maintained the same strength for over 20 years.
Going up to the point that they can beat PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS, consistently... Those people are 15 to 20 stones stronger than I am. That's somewhat comparable to comparing my 30 years of playing to someone who is literall picking up the stones for the first time in their life.
This is a huge advance, even if it is only optimising multiple moderate-depth playing engines.
wickerprints and sanosuke001 have discussed your lack of understanding of Go. Clearly, if you play at all, you're barely beyond absolute beginner level.
I suspect what really slowed down Go progress was that Chess was simply more popular
Almost certainly this has never been true. Chess may be better known in Europe and America - approaching a billion people, being generous - but Go has been by a margin the most popular board game in China, Japan the Koreas, Taiwan and other oriental countries, currently totalling over 1.5 times as many people. With the thousand-plus year time advantage Go has over Chess, I really doubt your assertion has ever been true.
But WTF - I've been proselytising for Go since 13 years before I got a phone line, let alone dial-up internet access. What would I know?
The end of a game is, traditionally, when both players pass. SOME rule sets (not all - you have to check your local rules in each tournament you attend) require you to hand over a stone to the opponent's prisoner pile each time you pass. SOME don't. Obviously, this affects the counting. Which is why you need to check the rule set in use.
IF the prisoner isn't handed over, and you pass but the opponent does not, then either s/he has added a stone to a dead group which remains dead - this will go into your prisoner pile at end-game ; OR the opponent has played an unnecessary stone into their own territory and lost themselves a point of empty territory ; OR there was undecided territory on the board where YOU ought to have played instead of passing!
Go is a considerably more complex game than novices (people in the first couple of thousand games of their career) generally realise.
you can't just make them up and then tell everyone they have to use your definition. That's crazy talk.
While you're not wrong, this might be a good moment to reflect that Go has a recorded history considerably longer than the history of the language you're writing in. (That's if you take your English back to Beowulf. "Hwat!" ; if you're talking about Shakespeare then the difference is greater.)
The mapping of chess game concepts thought English, into Japanese (or Chinese, or Korean) and onto Go game concepts is just slightly likely to lose something in the translation. Unless, of course, you're fluent in Go and in chess.
I stopped trying to keep up with the computational complexities in Go 20 years after I started to learn the game. That was before I got regular internet access.
That varies between rule sets. It is certainly a popular rule set, but there are others - for example the Nihon Kiin rule set has much more complex rules on kos which allows for some repetitions of the boar position if either player forces a triple ko. How to score, or decide on whether the game is ended is then very different.
I can't remember any particular stories, but I would suspect that people have died - disembowelled and/ or beheaded - over some of these rule disputes. Which is why the rules have been suggested.
It is important to establish your rules before starting a game. Particularly if you or your opponent has both swords.
When you play a stone onto the final remaining liberty of a stone or group of stones, then that group is removed from the board. Then the move is ended and you have to consider whether the board position is legal.
The atom of the game is "play stone and remove any prisoners captured, then consider if the board is legal", not "play stone, consider legality, then remove prisoners".
While I sympathise with distrusting "the Bay of Thieves", it does have the useful property that if you can find it on The Bay, then you can probably find it on a more reliable website. You might even get manufacturer's names, model numbers etc from which you can plough through more conventional suppliers (e.g. Radio Spares, Farnell) or less conventional (e.g. Alibaba).
Wading through the Bay doesn't mean you are going to buy there.
(Personally I've only had a couple of percent of my purchases off the Bay go awry. But I only buy stuff online rarely.)
So, we all know (hopefully) what a fencepost error is.
Now we can quantify how much worse a "Go board error" is than a fencepost error. Quite a lot worse.
I like the idea of writing a sparse ternary array of 361x361x361, and then having to take the 363rd power of that. TFA's suggestion that
Go counting could make a decent server benchmark:
* The task is well defined, easily understood, and non-artificial.
* The program code is small and self-contained.
* The generated data sets are huge.
* The problem is a typical instance of map-reduce, and thus representative of a wide class of popular problems.
* The computation requires a good balance of multi-core processing power, memory for sorting, and disk-IO.
* The board size parameter gives an entire family of benchmarks, where each increment corresponds to a factor of about 5 in effort.
He knows how to dangle a Babelfish in front of a nerd's ear!
To me, it's vitally important that you - whichever country you live in - get back to buying and burning "foreign" oil as soon as possible. Until we get this damned surplus of oil cleared up, we're hurting economically and may otherwise have to engineer a major war to bring prices back up.
Automatic transmissions (what some call slushboxes), will creep forward on their own if they are in gear and the brake isn't applied.
Which is what you have hand brakes for - a.k.a. parking brakes. After all, you've got one foot occupied with keeping the throttle depressed enough to keep the engine running ; the other foot is occupied feathering the clutch to keep the vehicle in position at the stop line, or on the hill, depending on what you're doing. So to apply and release the brake, you need either a co-driver, or to use your own hand.
I had a friend who would do the gear shift and/ or brake manipulation while I was driving him back from the pub. It was very disconcerting but could be done. Same guy once challenged me to drive from city centre out to the workshop without using the clutch at all. It certainly taught you to pay attention to your revolutions. I had a van with a broken clutch cable some time after that and the practice turned out to have been useful. Got the van and load back to the yard without the interminable bullshit of having to organise a tow truck, second van, transfer the load in the road... bleargh.
if a large mass of iron or other inert material were in a star, it would be much heavier than the gases so would sink into the core,
This is precisely what happens in the cores of stars as they go through the various stages of nucleosynthesis to produce heat. Initially, hydrogen goes to helium (which accumulates into an relatively inert core) ; then eventually the helium starts to "burn" to produce carbon (the Sun will probably go this far, but not much further ; not enough mass) which will accumulate in the core leaving a "shell" of helium burning. Eventually, given enough mass, the carbon will start to go to form neon, then the neon to produce oxygen, then sulphur, then silicon then iron. This is the standard story of stellar evolution, which is why Fred Hoyle was in the running for a Nobel in the 1950s. When you get to iron-56, the energy release essentially stops and your star has hours to a day or so left to live.
making it hard to have any effect on its light patterns.
The convection patterns inside stars are a bit hard to observe, and hard to model, but there is some material that gets up to the surface where we can see it. And blowing the star up in a supernova tends to release material from the core, which can be seen too. "Hard" to measure, but not impossible to estimate, and justify.
Also, if it was there for very long, the metals would probably vaporize eventually and disappear.
Metals don't disappear. They may disperse, and become a bit harder to see, but they're still there.
You know, I think you could benefit from, and enjoy, a MOOC on stellar evolution.
I don't know what you mean by transmission creep, or a slush box. But as for American states.... you know, some places over there, they allow people to own guns! Insane!
One can only deduce that their driving laws are as insane as the rest of their laws.
Nobody hit him, he just lapsed in attention and let the car creep forward.
I take it that he lost his driving license, or at the least was made to re-sit his driving test, since this is a clear breaking of the rules. When you come to a halt, you take the engine out of gear and engage the parking brake. No ifs, buts or maybes.
Is it true that the introduction of the automatic gearbox lowered driver IQ by several points over a decade? I certainly find them deeply disconcerting when I have to use one.
Oh, I don't think sedation would be necessary. The driver gets in, sits in the driver's seat, attaches 5-point harness to uncover the ignition switch. Waits for all passengers to be locked down in their seats and the doors locked shut before the engine will start. Then the driver stairs straight ahead out of the rear window as the car drives away forwards, and uses his joystick to indicate to the car's driving computer where the vehicle is to navigate to.
Just in case you didn't get it - driver's seat and all others face to the rear of the direction of travel.
Personally, having had one hard landing too many, that's the seat direction I always take if given a choice. It is MUCH safer than facing forwards.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll still prefer the click of stone on wood though. Computer Go just doesn't do it for me. If that means that a busy year is a half-dozen games ... well that still beats playing Go on the computer, even against a human.
I've never seen a discussion of AI that REQUIRED them to mimic humans. In fact, the unintelligent neural network approach to antenna design (artificial, with NO implication of intelligent search for a solution) produces designs explicable to physics, which work (your cell phone may well rely on one), but no-one knows how they get from this design to that. Their non-intelligence is different to human intelligence, but in some ways stronger.
Good luck with that. I mean, people have only been trying that for ...
The first computer-Go programmer I met and played against was in 1984. He was trying to do that, on IIRC a BBC Micro with 128kb of RAM.
I've been following the subject since then. Shockingly, you describe EXACTLY the process that most people have tried to implement. It was only about a decade ago that their progress crept ahead of my playing level. But since I only manage a half-dozen games a year on average, I've maintained the same strength for over 20 years.
Going up to the point that they can beat PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS, consistently ... Those people are 15 to 20 stones stronger than I am. That's somewhat comparable to comparing my 30 years of playing to someone who is literall picking up the stones for the first time in their life.
This is a huge advance, even if it is only optimising multiple moderate-depth playing engines.
Almost certainly this has never been true. Chess may be better known in Europe and America - approaching a billion people, being generous - but Go has been by a margin the most popular board game in China, Japan the Koreas, Taiwan and other oriental countries, currently totalling over 1.5 times as many people. With the thousand-plus year time advantage Go has over Chess, I really doubt your assertion has ever been true.
But WTF - I've been proselytising for Go since 13 years before I got a phone line, let alone dial-up internet access. What would I know?
IF the prisoner isn't handed over, and you pass but the opponent does not, then either s/he has added a stone to a dead group which remains dead - this will go into your prisoner pile at end-game ; OR the opponent has played an unnecessary stone into their own territory and lost themselves a point of empty territory ; OR there was undecided territory on the board where YOU ought to have played instead of passing!
Go is a considerably more complex game than novices (people in the first couple of thousand games of their career) generally realise.
If you're trying to be funny, it failed.
IF God existed, he'd play 3-d Go on 19x19x19, which would be on the order of L19^5^L19^L19, I think ( this result being "L19")
But each player has 3 possible moves, for every position on the board : play on this point ; play on any other legal point ; pass.
It's about 30,000 possible games, IIRC.
You were aware that you can pass in a game of Go? It's not the end of the game. So the number of initial plays on a 2x2 board is 5, not 4.
And as John says up-thread, he does include superko in his game definition.
... which is why you count the board state in ternary.
While you're not wrong, this might be a good moment to reflect that Go has a recorded history considerably longer than the history of the language you're writing in. (That's if you take your English back to Beowulf. "Hwat!" ; if you're talking about Shakespeare then the difference is greater.)
The mapping of chess game concepts thought English, into Japanese (or Chinese, or Korean) and onto Go game concepts is just slightly likely to lose something in the translation. Unless, of course, you're fluent in Go and in chess.
I stopped trying to keep up with the computational complexities in Go 20 years after I started to learn the game. That was before I got regular internet access.
More to the point, the 24 (IIRC, including symmetry operations) legal positions for a 2x2 game can occur multiple times in a game.
I can't remember any particular stories, but I would suspect that people have died - disembowelled and/ or beheaded - over some of these rule disputes. Which is why the rules have been suggested.
It is important to establish your rules before starting a game. Particularly if you or your opponent has both swords.
When you play a stone onto the final remaining liberty of a stone or group of stones, then that group is removed from the board. Then the move is ended and you have to consider whether the board position is legal.
The atom of the game is "play stone and remove any prisoners captured, then consider if the board is legal", not "play stone, consider legality, then remove prisoners".
I shall break the knuckles of the next web developer I meet. Pass the encouragement on to anyone you know at Slashcode and/ or WordPress.
Wading through the Bay doesn't mean you are going to buy there.
(Personally I've only had a couple of percent of my purchases off the Bay go awry. But I only buy stuff online rarely.)
Now we can quantify how much worse a "Go board error" is than a fencepost error. Quite a lot worse.
I like the idea of writing a sparse ternary array of 361x361x361, and then having to take the 363rd power of that. TFA's suggestion that Go counting could make a decent server benchmark: * The task is well defined, easily understood, and non-artificial. * The program code is small and self-contained. * The generated data sets are huge. * The problem is a typical instance of map-reduce, and thus representative of a wide class of popular problems. * The computation requires a good balance of multi-core processing power, memory for sorting, and disk-IO. * The board size parameter gives an entire family of benchmarks, where each increment corresponds to a factor of about 5 in effort. He knows how to dangle a Babelfish in front of a nerd's ear!
To me, it's vitally important that you - whichever country you live in - get back to buying and burning "foreign" oil as soon as possible. Until we get this damned surplus of oil cleared up, we're hurting economically and may otherwise have to engineer a major war to bring prices back up.
Which is what you have hand brakes for - a.k.a. parking brakes. After all, you've got one foot occupied with keeping the throttle depressed enough to keep the engine running ; the other foot is occupied feathering the clutch to keep the vehicle in position at the stop line, or on the hill, depending on what you're doing. So to apply and release the brake, you need either a co-driver, or to use your own hand.
I had a friend who would do the gear shift and/ or brake manipulation while I was driving him back from the pub. It was very disconcerting but could be done. Same guy once challenged me to drive from city centre out to the workshop without using the clutch at all. It certainly taught you to pay attention to your revolutions. I had a van with a broken clutch cable some time after that and the practice turned out to have been useful. Got the van and load back to the yard without the interminable bullshit of having to organise a tow truck, second van, transfer the load in the road ... bleargh.
This is precisely what happens in the cores of stars as they go through the various stages of nucleosynthesis to produce heat. Initially, hydrogen goes to helium (which accumulates into an relatively inert core) ; then eventually the helium starts to "burn" to produce carbon (the Sun will probably go this far, but not much further ; not enough mass) which will accumulate in the core leaving a "shell" of helium burning. Eventually, given enough mass, the carbon will start to go to form neon, then the neon to produce oxygen, then sulphur, then silicon then iron. This is the standard story of stellar evolution, which is why Fred Hoyle was in the running for a Nobel in the 1950s. When you get to iron-56, the energy release essentially stops and your star has hours to a day or so left to live.
The convection patterns inside stars are a bit hard to observe, and hard to model, but there is some material that gets up to the surface where we can see it. And blowing the star up in a supernova tends to release material from the core, which can be seen too. "Hard" to measure, but not impossible to estimate, and justify.
Metals don't disappear. They may disperse, and become a bit harder to see, but they're still there.
You know, I think you could benefit from, and enjoy, a MOOC on stellar evolution.
One can only deduce that their driving laws are as insane as the rest of their laws.
I take it that he lost his driving license, or at the least was made to re-sit his driving test, since this is a clear breaking of the rules. When you come to a halt, you take the engine out of gear and engage the parking brake. No ifs, buts or maybes.
Is it true that the introduction of the automatic gearbox lowered driver IQ by several points over a decade? I certainly find them deeply disconcerting when I have to use one.
Oh, I don't think sedation would be necessary. The driver gets in, sits in the driver's seat, attaches 5-point harness to uncover the ignition switch. Waits for all passengers to be locked down in their seats and the doors locked shut before the engine will start. Then the driver stairs straight ahead out of the rear window as the car drives away forwards, and uses his joystick to indicate to the car's driving computer where the vehicle is to navigate to.
Just in case you didn't get it - driver's seat and all others face to the rear of the direction of travel.
Personally, having had one hard landing too many, that's the seat direction I always take if given a choice. It is MUCH safer than facing forwards.