Here is another idea posted in Gammonline by Neil Kazaross:
Posted By: Neil Kazaross <address@hidden>
Date: Saturday, 28 September 2002, at 7:31 a.m.
Here's some food for thought for our Bot developers here.
In my opinion I think some improvement in match play strengths and bot
MWC can be had if bots are trained to play from the start both at DMP
and GG/GS. This hopefully would aid to our knowledge of BG and improve
human playing strength slightly as well.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand that my 3 bots
(SW,JF,GNU) select plays is that for each position they produce their
table of WBG,WG,W,L,LG,LBG and then make the proper adjustments
according to the values of G's and BG's won and lost at the match score.
For example at true GG when gammon value is 1 and gammon cost is zero
(BG's don't matter so I won't include in table) Let's suppose that play
A and B are estimated by our bot to give the following:
A) WG .15 W.55 L.45 LG.10 B) WG .10 W.55 L.45 LG.05
It's very clear that for money and DMP the two plays are pick-em and for
GG play A is correct and for GS play B is correct.
However, this evaluation table is produced by a bot which was trained
playing cubeless for money and not at critical scores. My contention is
that there's a trickle down effect throughout the game and learning
process which might produce a better evaluation if the bot was trained
at these critical scores.
So my first challange/question to the GNU developers is to train a
separate GNU engine just for DMP ! Clearly playing two GNU's vs each
other at DMP should result in 50.00 % wins for both sides after a long
number of trials. My belief is that a GNU trained from the start to
evaluate only at DMP will learn to do a better job of both evaluating
and playing at DMP since there's never any noise from gammons/BG's and
cubes to affect previous plays which could misslead the evaluation and
learning process.
Maybe the DMP bot can win about 50.5 to 51% at DMP vs the "normal" bot.
That would be significant and it might be making some instructively
different plays.
However, if the difference is only about 50.1 % , it wouldn't seem worth
the effort to include the DMP bot in the program.
If the DMP GNU bot proves sucessful, then we can move on to look at
GG/GS.
I have a very fast PC and if the GNU developers decide to do a DMP bot,
I'd be happy to use my 2.4 GHz for training it.
.ideas//comments// ??'s....neilkaz..