Re: current development

[Timothy Y. Chow]

Lots of interesting comments by Sarah Payne and Chris Bray, most of which 
make sense to me.  But there's one part that I have trouble believing.

> In my opinion, a phone version would broaden appeal / access but the 
> most critical issue is the neural nets. XG feels like a very different 
> animal as an opponent - noticeably more opportunistic & aggressive, so 
> some degree of congruence asap seems critical for gnubg to hold ground.

This sounds like psychological confirmation bias to me.  I don't think 
that XG and GNU play differently enough for any human to notice, unless 
we're talking about the "crippled" modes where the bot intentionally makes 
errors.

To be more specific, I would guess that over the course of 100 games, 
there would be only a handful of decisions that GNU 2-ply and XG 3-ply 
would make differently (excluding those non-contact positions where it 
doesn't really matter what you play), and I very much doubt that XG would 
be consistently "more opportunistic and aggressive."  I would be happy to 
be proved wrong, though.

Tim