Message #3310

From: Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] AlphaGo, 4D Go, Hyperbolic Go
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 10:59:43 -0500

That’s cool that you’ve played torus Go already, since this is exactly what
the duoprisms will be! If implemented using MagicTile, torus Go would
easily work in the 3D view as well. I have to say I’m not planning on
working on this myself at the moment, but would love it if someone adapted the
opensource code <https://github.com/roice3/MagicTile> to do it.

This past week, my brother (who now works with me at GE and is unaware of
this thread) came over to my desk with some printouts of euclidean {3,6}
and {6,3} tilings. We played a few games on them, and it was fun. I
thought {3,6} worked pretty well, even with 6 initial liberties per stone.
Perhaps the fact that there are 3 step loops helps overcome the extra
liberty situation. {6,3} didn’t work well in my opinion because it is way
too easy to capture groups and create ladders. It seems like black has
much more of an advantage by going first. Maybe with some more play,
techniques could arise that make it work.

It’s been great watching the games this past week and all the chatter on
social media. I’m quite happy to have some minimum understanding of the
game now.

Roice

On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 6:30 PM, Melinda Green melinda@superliminal.com
[4D_Cubing] <4D_Cubing@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

>
>
> It was indeed exciting, and I’m even going to predict that it was a game
> that will be remembered by history in much the same way as the pivotal
> chess game in which IBM’s chess bot Deep Blue beat the world champion Gary
> Kasparov with a move so brilliant that he was convinced they had cheated.
> This first of five Go games contained what appeared to me to be a similarly
> devastating move by the machine. Here <https://youtu.be/vFr3K2DORc8?t=28m>
> is the video capture of the live event. It’s really ragged at the beginning
> as I don’t think Google was prepared for all the watchers but it gets
> better over time. Game commentary is provided by a wonderful expert,
> Michael Redmond, who plays at a similarly high level and he also explains a
> lot of basic concepts though you can easily find many other great places to
> quickly learn the basics if you are interested.
>
> I’ve played one 13x13 game of Go on a torus and a another on a cylinder,
> and they were very interesting. The problem with the torus, and perhaps
> other polytopes, is that the lack of borders and corners leaves you feeling
> rather naked as all territory must be built in empty space. It was an
> equally strange experience going back to a normal board after just one
> small game on a torus. I’m not sure how to describe the experience but I’ll
> just say that it hurt my normal game for a surprising amount of time.
>
> My game on the cylinder was a little more interesting to me. I think it
> becomes natural for each player to sort of stake out one end, and then to
> create rings in the middle in such a way as to capture opponent’s rings.
> You need to understand a bit about the game to understand this but it seems
> to naturally come down to what are called capturing races. I think that
> playing on a torus might work well if non-square dimensions are chosen such
> that these sorts of rings become important but not too important.
>
> Go variants played on boards with different vertex valences have been
> tried but I get the feeling that 4 really is the best choice. So Roice may
> be right that a {5,4} would make for an interesting choice since it
> preserves the familiar vertices. I don’t think that infinite boards will be
> attractive, but finite ones with negative curvature might work though the
> lack of borders and corners might be even worse than on a torus.
>
> MagicTile could be an ideal platform for testing out some of these ideas.
> There is a small but passionate population of Go players who enjoy
> exploring non-standard boards and would certainly love this idea. I like
> the idea of playing on the skeleton of duoprisms though I think the
> particular choice of duoprism will be very important to how well it adapts
> to the game. If you implemented this, would it still work in the 3D view?
> As we’ve seen with the IRP puzzles, the 3D view was not helpful but it sure
> looks great and helps to explain the topology. As with the duoprisms, I
> suspect that the particular choice of IRP would be important.
>
> If you’re seriously considering integrating Go into MagicTile, I suggest
> contacting some of the people in the Go community who like to play on
> non-standard boards to find out what excites them the most.
>
> -Melinda
>
>
> On 3/9/2016 9:38 AM, Roice Nelson roice3@gmail.com [4D_Cubing] wrote:
>
> Anyone catch the match last night? Melinda and I did, and are
> enthusiastically discussing it. It was awesome! You can watch the
> remaining games live here
> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP7jMXSY2xbc3KCAE0MHQ-A>.
>
> To connect the excitement back to the group, I wanted to mention you can
> play Go on the 1-skeletons of 4D polytopes using an early version of
> Jenn3D. Head to the very bottom of this page
> <http://www.math.cmu.edu/%7Efho/jenn/> to try. Duoprisms are
> particularly interesting, because you can use them to make boards that
> remove all the edges of a traditional board but are otherwise the same.
> Playing on polytopes feels like it would generally have too much freedom
> though, especially if single stones have more than 4 adjacent liberties.
>
> Adapting MagicTile to support Go might work well, since it would keep the
> boards as 2D surfaces. A {5,4} tiling would be a natural choice for a
> first board, and probably some of Andrea Hawksley’s ideas about
> non-euclidean <http://blog.andreahawksley.com/non-euclidean-chess-part-2/>
> chess would apply. But I also wonder if hyperbolic Go would be
> fundamentally flawed. Random walks in the Poincaré disk inevitably escape
> to infinity. For this reason, it is almost impossible to heat a house in
> the disk because you can’t stop the heat from escaping (p37 of the book The
> Scientific Legacy of Poincare
> <http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Legacy-Poincare-History-Mathematics/dp/082184718X/>).
> I wonder then if it would similarly be almost impossible to surround
> territory in hyperbolic Go. We need to try this!
>
> Roice
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