
Questions I would ask God about the game of Go - ivee
http://fuseki.net/home/QuestionsIwouldaskGodaboutthegameofgo.html
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CydeWeys
> Is go played anywhere else in the universe, and was it discovered by chance
> there?

> What openings do aliens play?

I love these questions about if anyone else in the universe is playing Go. My
gut response would be yes -- it's a simple enough game (regular game grid of
any size roughly 5x5 on up, one type of piece, two players take turns
alternating placing pieces, and any that are surrounded are removed). I
suspect other simple enough games that likely exist elsewhere in the universe
would be tic-tac-toe, connect-N, dots and boxes, and Othello/Reversi -- any
others?

Contrast with, say, Chess, which has too many different types of pieces, all
with specific movement rules, and with a specific initial layout. I wouldn't
be surprised if Chess only existed here, though I also would expect plenty of
games similar to Chess to exist out there in the universe, i.e. a game on a
regular board with multiple types of pieces and different rules for moving the
different pieces. If Shogi, Checkers, or Stratego weren't human games I
wouldn't be surprised to learn them from aliens.

It's a great question -- what is the most universal board game? What board
game has been independently invented the most times throughout the universe?
What if it's a game that we haven't even come up with?

~~~
beojan
> My gut response would be yes

I'd guess no, since there doesn't seem to be another human culture /
civilization that independently invented it.

~~~
CydeWeys
Go is a pretty generic game that leans heavily on basic mathematics and
geometry (which are universal). You really think it could only be invented by
humans? Why?

~~~
ivanbakel
"It could only be invented by humans" is a very different statement to "no
aliens will have invented it". That's making an ought out of an is.

The intention of the GP was - given that Go was not invented again on Earth,
there's no real indication that it would be invented again at all. That
doesn't imply that it cannot be invented again because it is too complex.

~~~
CydeWeys
I'm not following how this logically follows at all. It _was_ invented here,
so if anything, its invention here is a great data point that it could easily
be invented elsewhere too (take a Bayesian approach to it). I don't see how
its invention here somehow counts as evidence _against_ it being invented
elsewhere! There are an infinite number of games that haven't been invented
here; all of those would seem to be much less likely to exist elsewhere than
ones that actually were invented here.

Also, it's kind of silly to count something _not_ have being reinvented
against it, because things almost by definition cannot be reinvented. Look at
how popular board games are right now; if Go hadn't yet been invented, it's
quite possible that it would be invented now. But instead it has already been
invented, so people already know about it, and any would-be inventors end up
not being inventors; they either already know about it or are told that what
they've come up with already exists.

~~~
shkkmo
> Also, it's kind of silly to count something not have being reinvented
> against it, because things almost by definition cannot be reinvented.

Well, they can, but the opportunities are limited to cultures where the game
has not been introduced yet.

I would also point out that we don't know that Go was never invented
independently on earth, just that it was never invented and popularized in a
manner that left a cultural or historic record of which we are aware. If Go
were played by a small clan of prehistoric people using different color
berries and a grid scratched out in the dirt, what evidence would be left?

So that REALLY limits the opportunities to cultures that left a significant
historic record but had no cultural exchange with china.

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mark_l_watson
That was fun. My favorite two questions are:

Is go played anywhere else in the universe, and was it discovered by chance
there? What openings do aliens play?

Our Universe is a huge place. I think it was Nature Magazine that had an
article estimating 20,000 worlds with earth like conditions and life. My
formal education is in physics and personally I subscribe to the multiverse
hypothesis so with a potential infinite number of universes these questions
have meaning.

My older brother taught me to play Go when I was eight and I played actively
in the 1970s. Two years ago, on a whim, I decided to go to the US Go Open. I
drastically overestimated my own rating when registering, played too strong of
players and lost every game. A good lesson in humility and I made some
friends. To lick my battle wounds, I paid a South Korean Go professional for
lessons for three months and I feel like that really helped my game.

~~~
treve
20,000 seems a little low. I imagine this needs at least 10 more zeroes

~~~
marcoperaza
Any number is a bad guess because we don’t have any sense of the likelihood of
life emerging, even in the “optimal conditions”. It could be so unlikely that
it’s probable there is no other life, it could be so likely that almost every
“viable” planet has life, anywhere in between, or it could be that God created
exactly as much life as he wanted, which could be, again, any number.

We have a sample size of one and what must be, in the grand scheme, a
primitive understanding of physics and chemistry and biology. Throwing around
numbers and probabilities for the existence of other life is frankly
ridiculous. The best we can intelligently talk about is what the number is
given some guess about other numbers. But remember, we have no good numbers
for the emergence of life, the survival of life, the likelihood of evolution
into intelligent life, etc. Any number multiplied by a totally unknown factor
can be literally anything.

And before someone throws the infinite universe argument at me, of course. Any
probability above zero times infinity is infinity. (Though it’s also possible
that there is still no extraterrestrial life even in that case, that outcome
always has a non-zero probability!) If we accept a probabilistic emergence of
life, then we need to talk about useful things like “in our solar system”, “in
our galaxy”, “in the visible universe”, and such. Though it is theoretically
possible that the conditions for the emergence of intelligent life are so
narrow that only planets exactly like ours, so exactly like it that someone
else on that planet has or will typed out this exact comment, have it. In a
truly infinite, random (hmm, another bad assumption perhaps?) universe, there
would be infinitely many such exact replicas of Earth and its entire visible
universe. This isn’t a very useful concept.

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Izkata
Can someone explain this Q/A to me?

> Is there a safe way to prevent Mirror Go?

> A really sad result of talking to God about go would be that there is a way
> to just play mirror go and win. If that was all god did, it would be really
> annoying. If mirror go doesn't actually work, how does God defeat it? Do the
> variants where W is just not allowed to mirror fix the issue?

The first way I was aware of was that the primary player could surround the
center. They'll capture the mirroring player's stones one turn before the
mirroring player can surround theirs, and the mirroring player loses the
stones they need to do a mirrored capture.

Sensei's Library [0] has a few other ways as well.

[0]
[https://senseis.xmp.net/?CounteringMirrorGo](https://senseis.xmp.net/?CounteringMirrorGo)

~~~
bluecalm
Mirror go isn't considered a strong strategy in a game with komi. You don't
need to do anything extraordinary either. Just play natural moves and at the
end you win by komi.

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elcomet
Do things like "best opening move", "worst handicap placement" or similar make
sense if you assume perfect play ?

I would think not, because when you have perfect play, you either win, lose or
draw. So you just have "winning opening moves", "losing opening moves", and
"draw opening moves". You cannot really rank them.

Maybe the ranking would be the number of different games that lead you to a
win, in a monte-carlo tree search fashion. Which could then be useful if you
can't play perfectly (highest probability of winning).

~~~
afthonos
Go has points. An opening move is better than another if, given perfect play
thereafter, you end up with more points.

~~~
elcomet
But are those points counted in tournaments, or are they just counted to know
who won the game ?

So, if you have a very clear path of how to win by 1 point, or a risky way to
win by 10 points, does it make sense to try the risky path ?

~~~
afthonos
They are not officially counted, but they are often used as an informal
indication of strength difference among players.

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kentiko
> For that matter, how did humans discover go?

I like how he used the word "discovered" and not "invented".

~~~
sunstone
Some time ago I had this discussion with my math prof. Are new math things
discovered or invented? We did not agree :)

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tunesmith
One question I never found an answer for was what AlphaGo thought komi should
be. Since Black goes first, it has an advantage of x stones. But if Black is
given a handicap of 2 stones (placed on the board before play), white then
goes first.

Since AlphaGo plays itself, it could have been set to play itself with a
handicap, such that the win rate was 50%. I want to know what that handicap
would have been, because wouldn't that indicate a pretty accurate measurement
of what komi should be?

~~~
bluecalm
I agree. There are many interesting questions Deep Mind could have answered
about both go and chess. I am still bitter they didn't take a few days more to
run experiments of great interest for fans of both games. For chess the
simplest one would be to take most popular positions from top level human play
and let A0 play Stockfish from that (say 10 times from every of 100
positions). Then do the same for self-play and then most importantly publish
all the games not selected sample. They kinda did something similar but the
positions they selected were chosen for entertainment value. We still don't
know how Alpha Zero plays from positions that are actually interesting for
human players.

~~~
monkeypizza
Open source research is continuing.

There are a few open source implementations of the alphago algorithm and some
new work being done to improve it for go. Check out lizzie, which is a nice
front end to leela zero.

[https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17095](https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17095)

------
blowski
I don't know how to play Go, and I'm not very good at maths. How many of these
questions could be answered without going to an omniscient heavenly being?

~~~
hyperpape
Go is a finite game, so almost all these questions can be answered by just
writing an algorithm that enumerates all the possible games and gives the
answer. However, the game space is so big that approach would never finish.
Further, I doubt any of them could practically be proven, even with some
smarter algorithm. It's akin to how even with all the advances made in
computer chess, we still don't know what perfect play looks like.

I do think we already have good evidence the best komi is 7 or 7.5, but it's
not definitive.

The question of what the best ko rule is value based (different rules have
different consequences/aesthetics for gameplay).

~~~
IggleSniggle
From Wikipedia:

Komidashi
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komidashi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komidashi)

"Komi in the game of Go are points added to the score of the player with the
white stones as compensation for playing second. Black's first move advantage
is generally considered to equal somewhere between 5 and 7 points by the end
of the game. Standard komi is 6.5 points under the Japanese and Korean rules;
under Chinese, Ing and AGA rules standard komi is 7.5 points. Komi typically
applies only to games where both players are evenly ranked. In the case of a
one-rank difference, the stronger player will typically play with the white
stones and players often agree on a simple 0.5 point komi to break a tie in
favour of white."

------
mcbuilder
Would not Alpha Go Zero and related algorithms give us a good insight into the
question about what openings alien's might play? Isn't it really tackling the
game from first (or zeroth if you will) principles, just simulated games
without the historical baggage coming from human study. It has also
considerably changed our own knowledge of the opening.

~~~
Sharlin
I don’t think so. The go that AlphaGo plays is one very specific type of
”alien go” that exploits the strengths of the computing substrate it thinks
on. Alien entities that are still evolved via natural selection would probably
play go differently from humans based on their own biological and cultural
idiosyncracies, but I doubt it would on average be _closer_ to how a Monte
Carlo tree search running on transistors plays rather than in another
direction entirely.

~~~
tarvaina
This is a good point. While Alpha Zero etc. are much stronger than humans,
they may have weak areas. Actually we know one: ladders.

Ladder is a fundamental technique that is easy for humans but hard for both
monte carlo and neural network static analysis. It is plausible that an
equally strong but more ladder-aware player would have very different tactics
from the current best computer players.

The original AlphaGo actually had a hand-crafted ladder feature input layer.
It was removed in Alpha Zero. We know from Leela Zero and ELF Go game records
that they don’t understand ladders very well, so likely Alpha Zero didn’t
understand them either.

~~~
tarvaina
Actually if anyone here follows current go bot development, I would like to
know if they currently have some specific ladder features to address this
weakness?

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H8crilA
Funny that God is just a PSPACE oracle. At least in the sense that the oracle
can answer essentially all of those questions.

~~~
jofer
I think you didn't read far enough... (See aliens questions later on)

That having been said, I think it's fascinating that most of these questions
are just that, but are impossible to answer at present. The probability space
is just too large. It's one of the fascinating aspects of go. It's a very
simple set of mathematical rules that yields incredibly complex behavior and
is practical impossible to brute force "perfect" gameplay as a result. I.e.
you can't search the full space, you have to learn to predict optional
strategies and always wonder if there isn't a better solution somewhere.

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kburman
Now i wonder will God know everything that universe has to offer.

For example i wrote a 3 page article. Even would be surprised be surprised if
a person came and tell me if we took all the characters at prime number it
would be a valid sentence about an event going to happen in future.

------
phkahler
The best placement for handicap stones seems most for perfect play. For tic-
tac-toe I prefer to start in the middle because "not losing" takes more
thought for the other player, but assuming perfect play it doesnt matter where
you start - the game is a draw.

------
Trufa
Vaguely related, I still hold the hope that a perfect game of chess ends in
black winning with the longest ever zugzwang! That would definitely would be
among my questions!

------
tzs
I once tried to write a math/CS nerd's description of the rules of Go. There's
an XHTML file of the results at
[https://pastebin.com/Cn7tbv98](https://pastebin.com/Cn7tbv98) if anyone is
curious.

Below is a text version:

Here is an attempt to describe the rules of Go precisely. This is actually for
a generalization of Go that I call MANGO, which stands for MAth Nerd Go

Equipment

To play Mango, you need the following:

• A countable set, I.

• A set, C, whose members are subsets of I, each of which contains exactly two
members of I.

• Three subsets of I, called E, B, and W, such that their union is I, and the
intersections of any pair of them is empty.

• A real-valued function F, whose domain is I.

• A function, T, whose range is {0,1}, that is defined on the real numbers.

Definitions

• If P is a finite subset of C, and n is a member of I, then the INDEX of n in
P is the number of elements of P that contain n.

• A finite subset, P, of C is called a PATH if the following conditions are
met:

1\. Each element of I has an index in P of 0, 1, or 2.

2\. There are exactly two elements of I whose index in P is 1.

• An element of I whose index in a path is 1 is called an ENDPOINT of the
path.

• An element of I whose index in a path is 2 is called an INTERIOR point of
the path.

• Let S be one of the sets B or W. Let s be a member of S. Let L be the set of
all members, e, of E, such that there is a path whose endpoints are s and e,
and whose interior points are all in S or E. Let z be the sum over L of F.
Then s is ALIVE if T(z) = 1.

• The ordered triple (E,B,W) is called the CONFIGURATION.

Playing

The players must first obtain a Mango set. This consists of agreeing to the
sets I, C, E, B, and W, and the functions F and T.

The players must agree to an initial score for each player.

The players than decide who shall have the first turn. Players alternate
turns.

On a players turn, that player may do one of two things:

• The player may PASS. It then becomes the other players turn.

• The player may make a LEGAL MOVE.

Note that a player _MUST_ either pass or play a legal move. If there is no
legal move, the player is forced to pass.

A MOVE consists of performing several actions. In the following, if it is
Black's turn we will use the symbol M to refer to the set B and the symbol H
to refer to the set set W. If it is White's turn, M will be W and H will be B.
Here are the actions that are taken by a player on that players turn:

• A member, n, of E is selected.

• n is removed from E and added to M.

• All members of H that are not alive at the end of the above step are removed
from H and placed in E.

• All members of M that are not alive at the end of the previous step are
removed from M and placed in E.

A move is a LEGAL MOVE if the configuration, (E,B,W), produced by the move is
new.

The game ends when two consecutive turns are passes.

Scoring

Each player uses the following procedure to compute his score. We will use the
symbol M to refer to B if the player is Black, and to refer to W if the player
is White.

We use the symbol H to refer I-(E union M).

The player starts with the initial score agreed upon at the start of the game.

For each m in M, the player receives F(m) points.

A player receives F(n) points for each member, n, of E for which the following
conditions both hold:

• There exists a path with n as one endpoint and the other endpoint in M, and
which contains no members of H as interior points.

• All paths that contain n as one endpoint and a member of H as the other
endpoint contain a member of M as an interior point.

The player with the most points wins.

Example

To play ordinary 19x19 Go, with a 5.5 point Komi, the players might agree to
the following:

• I = { (x,y) | x and y are integers in [1,19] }

• C = { {(x,y),(u,v)} | (x,y) and (u,v) are in I, (x-u)^2+(y-v)^2 = 1 }

• B = W = {}

• E = I

• The initial scores are 0 for Black, 5.5 for White.

• It is Blacks turn.

• F((x,y)) = 1

• T(z) = int((z+360)/361)

To play a Go-like game on an infinite board, the players might agree to this:

• I = { (x,y) | x and y are integers }

• C = { {(x,y),(u,v)} | (x,y) and (u,v) are in I, (x-u)^2+(y-v)^2 = 1 }

• B = W = {}

• E = I

• Initial scores are Black:0, White:0.

• It is Black to move.

• F((x,y)) = exp(-x^2-y^2)

• T(z) = 1 if z > 1/1000, otherwise T(z) = 0

~~~
tromp
I tried the same with the Logical Rules of Go [1] which translate easily into
Haskell.

[1] [https://tromp.github.io/go.html](https://tromp.github.io/go.html)

------
Iv
Unfortunately Lemy is dead

