OK, David B. I had to construct a twenty move long line of play to find a convincing win for Black here. But is this really the way you guys are thinking? Twenty moves ahead? Or did David resign on move 39 because you and he saw a much simpler win for Black that might have been obvious to you guys but I am simply missing? (mc)
A grandmaster in chess was once asked how many moves he looks ahead, and he replied, "Just one. But it's the right one."
If you set Twixtbot to Monte Carlo Tree Search = 0, it looks just one move ahead, but it's a really good one. It is still stronger than me at that setting. One-shot neural net intuition. Then when you turn on the tree search, it's pretty hard to beat. (Still, it hasn't solved the game.)
In a game like Twixt, you are staring down a combinatorial explosion. To manage xⁿ, instead of increasing n, it's better to decrease x. That is to say, instead of just trying to brute force yourself further into the combinatorial explosion, if you hone your intuition to see the best x=2 moves instead of the best 3 or 4, it just gets easier to see further down the line. If you can get close to x=1, you can see very far indeed. And as David demonstrated, sometimes that also makes the line shorter.
39.r12 40.s16 41.u19 42.v19 43.v17 44.t20 45.r17 46.q17 47.p11 48.o11 49.p9 50.p10 51.n10 52.k11 53.j9 54.i12 55.h14 56.g13 57.f13 58.e12
If you set Twixtbot to Monte Carlo Tree Search = 0, it looks just one move ahead, but it's a really good one. It is still stronger than me at that setting. One-shot neural net intuition. Then when you turn on the tree search, it's pretty hard to beat. (Still, it hasn't solved the game.)
In a game like Twixt, you are staring down a combinatorial explosion. To manage xⁿ, instead of increasing n, it's better to decrease x. That is to say, instead of just trying to brute force yourself further into the combinatorial explosion, if you hone your intuition to see the best x=2 moves instead of the best 3 or 4, it just gets easier to see further down the line. If you can get close to x=1, you can see very far indeed. And as David demonstrated, sometimes that also makes the line shorter.