Newsgroups: comp.ai.games
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From: sje@mv.mv.com (Steven J. Edwards)
Subject: Re: Chess - exhaustive searching
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Date: Fri, 14 Apr 1995 20:37:47 GMT
References: <scottecD6FAH9.2pp@netcom.com> <3ln0ol$ame@mycroft.rand.org> 	<D6GDIx.DM@cs.vu.nl> <3mjel3$q4e@nic.lth.se> <D6zECo.C24@mv.mv.com> <GEERT.95Apr14194948@sparc.aie.nl>
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geert@sparc.aie.nl (Geert-Jan van Opdorp) writes:

>In article <D6zECo.C24@mv.mv.com> sje@mv.mv.com (Steven J. Edwards) writes:

>>   considers state space enumeration to be a good metric for evaluation
>>   of game complexity.  It is a trivial exercise to construct games with
>>   arbirarily large spaces that are simple to solve.

>It seems to me that examples of trivial games with large spaces do not show
>that for non-trivial games the size of the space is not an important
>factor of their complexity. If the space is small enough, solving the game
>is always trivial.

I did not claim that the constructed game needed to be trivial, only
that the construction process itself was simple.

>I've always thought it was to a large extend due to the branching factor
>that Go is so much harder then Chess. Am I wrong you think? Or do I 
>misinterpret `complexety'? 

I think that state space enumeration is a shaky foundation to compare
the complexity of go and chess.  I think that go, while being
difficult to program, has not had the attention that has been seen by
chess and checkers (draughts).  That is the main reason why there are
not world class go programs.  I suspect that there is a possibility of
someone finding a fast pattern recognition algorithm for go that could
be easily programmed if only one knew what it was.  I do not think
there is a similar algorithm for chess or checkers.

-- Steven (sje@mv.mv.com)

