= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
PhilGoetz comments on Rationality Lessons in the Game of Go - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (145)
No, that doesn't sound right at all. You make it sound like there is linear growth and that all moves are sort of the same. When I hear small advantages escalate, I imagine something more like exponential growth. Small moves, early on, compound throughout chess and can lead to bigger and bigger advantages. From what I understand of go, this is not the same. Small mistakes early on are unlikely to be crippling.
Try redoing the calculation with geometric averaging: 300 moves, 150 of which are yours, suppose the final score is 80 to 70:
I don't think that's an improvement. As I said in another comment just now, I think that in go having a small advantage does not make you more likely to gain additional advantages.
Then why does handicapping work? Giving someone 3 stones on star points at the start of a game will have a much larger impact than giving them 3 stones on star points at the end of the game.
I finally saw your point-- moves are more valuable at the beginning of the game, mistakes come at a more or less constant rate, therefore the margin of victory shouldn't be divided up evenly into every move of the game. Yes.
I tried to put a blanket disclaimer in my post that started this thread ("There are some problems with averaging things like this which I probably don't need to point out to you all...") in the interest of brevity but perhaps that was a mistake.
There are problems with my calculation that yours does not solve. Namely, mistakes do not tend to be small and come at a constant rate. If I lose by 10 points it's entirely possible that I made a single 20 point mistake and my opponent made 10 single point mistakes. (well, for example only. In reality amateurs make a lot more mistakes than that)
That said, now that I understand why you suggested it, your calculation does represent the situation more accurately.
The escalate/accumulate/linear/exponential discussion threw me off, as did the fact that I was looking for an answer expressed in points (it's easier to visualize what that means), and the fact that I have seen this calculation done by stronger players than I am. Obviously an answer expressed in points can't be constant throughout the game, and I should have seen that.