Re: [gnugo-devel] Patch: improve separation of similarly-valued moves

[Inge Wallin]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, aquarius wrote:

> Why not set this bonus randomly from an appropriate range each move?
> A carefully chosen range would assure that the best move (e.g. the joseki)
> would be played at least some times.

Well, sometimes there is an easy choice between two moves that are both
marked as joseki.  A good example is arion:1, which was my original
motivation for the patch.

> How is the current scheme deciding on playing a 'second-best move' for the
> sake of randomness in play? Could'nt my suggestion be adopted to all moves?

When the minimum value is greater than 25, which is the case for all types
of joseki moves, then the bonus for other move reason is not used.
Instead, a small random value is added to the min value and thus the
random choice between joseki moves.

My patch removed this limit, so it made play less random.  But better.

> And then make the random range a command-line parameter defaulting to little
> or medium randomness. This way GNU Go would gain another aspect of 
> "personality"
> ranging from "play as good as you possibly can, but boring" to "make terrible
> blunders now and then regardless of level parameter".

There is a TODO item to implement "playing styles".  This could be
something similar, but I don't like such random randomness. :-)  The
randomness must be tightly controlled.

        -Inge