-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Justin O. Wyss-Gallifent wrote:
In rec.games.go Chris Lawrence wrote:

: Go isn't anywhere near that stage and all programs developed so far play
: at a relatively 'experienced beginner' level. It's not for lack of
: processing grunt, it's down to Go needing human intelligence and
: intuition to play well.

I believe this is a bit premature of a statement.

Oh I just classified it in with the statement by Pachman about computers
never reaching Grandmaster level in chess because ...

Whilst humans can do it and computers can't it is called intelligence
and intuition**, and when the computers overtake us it is called brute
force, number crunching, rule following etc.

Humans don't like the idea of computers being "better" than they are, so
we tend to judge them by the things we are good at, playing Go,
translating poetry, and talking. Rather than the things they are good
at, like chess, maths, logic, data handling.

It is of course an irrational response, as we are nothing like
computers, so trying to draw a comparison is pointless. A program either
is or isn't better at a specific task than a specific human, assuming
that that task requires special human like powers, unless you have
evidence to that effect, other than no one has figured out how best to
program it, is also irrational.

I do realize the massive amounts of positions, et cetera, that need to be
considered, but it seems entirely possible that algorithms might emerge in
the future which can do large overviews of the board and return ideas
which to a human might pass for intuition and might avoid the raw
computation of the possibility-trees altogether.

I'd say probable, as far as we can ascertain massively parallel
computers have exceeded the processing and storage capacities of the
human brain, so all we need is the software for whatever task is at
hand, be it Go, or consciousness (whatever that may be).

I see no evidence from biology, chemistry or physics, that human brains
do anything "weird", "mysterious" or "quantum" (as certain maths
Professors might have us believe).

I suspect the primary reason that computers beat the world at Chess and
not Go, are cultural, the west followed this route in AI and used chess
as its guinea pig, the east seemed more interested in robots and ended
up with large amounts of the worlds car manufacturing industry. If
Shannon and Turing had been more into Go than Chess, I wonder what
modern computers would be like?

If I had to stick my neck out I'd say, Go may be the first game where
the heuristics used to defeat the best humans are computer generated.
Automated weighting adjustments were needed for both Checkers and Chess,
but I suspect Go may be mastered by a program where that "tuning" or
"evolution" is taken to the point where the "authors" don't understand
how the program is choosing it's moves.

Simon

** I just finished ploughing through the analysis of a load of chess
games, where again and again human "intuition" produced better moves
than the computer analysing the games, yet the program is demonstrably
much stronger than any of the human players involved.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE/DuotGFXfHI9FVgYRAskgAKC9lgzFd/oCWyZtYwfSHSG6YBYyUQCgjDEp
bPDe6EBhgKc8Kfp5WzATv50=
=M7O7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----