Re: current development

[Joseph Heled]

Totally agree.  "more opportunistic & aggressive" should be accompanied by (at a minimum) a few key examples.

On Sun, 26 Jan 2020 at 08:32, Timothy Y. Chow <address@hidden> wrote:

Lots of interesting comments by Sarah Payne and Chris Bray, most of which
make sense to me.  But there's one part that I have trouble believing.

> In my opinion, a phone version would broaden appeal / access but the
> most critical issue is the neural nets. XG feels like a very different
> animal as an opponent - noticeably more opportunistic & aggressive, so
> some degree of congruence asap seems critical for gnubg to hold ground.

This sounds like psychological confirmation bias to me.  I don't think
that XG and GNU play differently enough for any human to notice, unless
we're talking about the "crippled" modes where the bot intentionally makes
errors.

To be more specific, I would guess that over the course of 100 games,
there would be only a handful of decisions that GNU 2-ply and XG 3-ply
would make differently (excluding those non-contact positions where it
doesn't really matter what you play), and I very much doubt that XG would
be consistently "more opportunistic and aggressive."  I would be happy to
be proved wrong, though.

Tim