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Sports -- OT--with BG addition that is On-T

Posted By: mamabear
Date: Monday, 6 June 2011, at 11:34 a.m.

In Response To: Sports -- OT--with BG addition that is On-T (Bob Koca)

Perhaps "creativity" is not quite the right word, and that is why people are getting a bit hung up trying to find examples for you. Maybe it would be better to describe the concept as "going one step further than minimizing PR" or something to that effect. Then we have room for rationally playing a move that isn't by the book, in an effort to win the match against a human opponent rather than vs. the bot. A comparable example would be an unsound sacrifice in chess, but one where you don't expect (perhaps based on prior experience, or just on their USCF rating) that your opponent knows the line in advance, and you also think it's highly unlikely they will figure out how to bust it over the board within the time controls you are using.

An example would be 53P 21$ instead of the play the current rollouts choose by a tiny margin, 21S. I wouldn't do that to be different or "creative", but because I want the human opponent to run into trouble making later cube decisions if I get a pure prime going and theirs still has a hole in it. Since the difference the rollout shows is tiny, I think 53P 21$ is well worth a .008 PR hit to try for that downstream result.

Playing against the bot doesn't leave much opportunity for this kind of "going further". Even though all the bots make errors, they are hard to for a human player to exploit. If a human tries to draw the bot into a characteristic error by means of a novelty, using a play that is only slightly "wrong", it might work, but the tiny game or match equity difference that decision will make will be swamped by the effect of the same human's much larger number and magnitude of errors compared to those of the bot. In the long run, the human simply isn't going to beat the thing.

But IMO rolling out ever-stronger bots isn't going to kill interest in human vs. human BG, any more than the invention of the steam engine and railroads killed interest in horse racing. Pure speed isn't the only factor of interest for racing, nor is minimizing PR all that matters to BG players at a tournament.

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