Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl
7 hours ago
I have some questions as a chess player who barely even understands the rules of go. First these josekis sound like what in chess is called a forced tactical sequence. When you say Shin played out a long complex joseki, how does he do that? Does he have to read/calculate it out over the board(50 moves seems crazy to me unless the search tree is highly constrained by geometry/deduction/very few candidate moves, which does occasionally happen in chess endgames), or is the joseki more of a fixed sequence of moves which he's memorised, only needing to read to "punish" if the opponent diverges?
Second, if it is a fixed sequence, how position independent is it? In chess, tactical sequences end up depending on the entire board state to work when they get sufficiently long. I guess what I'm asking is, could a player with some capacity for stategic thinking recognise this idea and take steps to make the flying knife impossible?
I really should spend some more time learning go, it's such a fascinating game.
You can think of joseki as “local opening”. Like, in a vacuum, this is known by study / AI to be an even result for black and white. It’s just like a chess opening, there’s no calculation up to a certain point. And it doesn’t exist in the midgame, it’s not similar to forced sequences which exist in both games; it’s much more like choosing French closed vs open or gambit/gambit declined. The one thing is (and this is huge), since Go board is very big, existing stone formations on other parts of the board influence the value of joseki and make certain ones more advantageous for black or white. To my knowledge this doesn’t really exist in chess, because the opening is already the entire board.
However, when Shin executed the 50 move flying knife, the board was pretty much empty. So there is really no need for calculation, both Shin and the AI know it’s locally optimal. But getting to play a very long locally optimal sequence is good for the weaker player, so they have less “real” moves to lose EV on. Notably Shin probably can’t open with the flying knife in one corner past a certain point in the game, even if that corner were completely empty - the rest of the board positions would change the end values of the variants.
If the AI could know this, they might play a variant that ends 30 moves sooner but is 0.01 pts worse. Then they would have more time to mess Shin up through organic new moves (which the AI will be better at of course).
(disclaimer: only ranked 1 dan)
Joseki are akin to book openings in chess, eg, we routinely see players going 20+ moves entirely from AI prep.