Centaur players

Hi everyone I think that a good way, so that no one cheats, is to create the option of making a human account with computer assistance, maybe only to play unrated or rated, in order I would like to use this account to test my thoughts with the help of crazy stones, first to check my ideas and how to play better, im not sure, but is good idea for improver, like centaur, what do you think?

PD (account Alma profesional) Alma Pacifica is human only.

Just play offline against Leela Zero if that’s what you want.

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@Alma_Pacifica When it comes to centaur concepts it is different, than regular learning as someone experienced in Centaur Chess, Go, and a little Othello, it is about understanding weaknesses of programs that humans are better at and help assist programs navigate down the proper path rather than mindlessly follow what a program says as some things need improvements especially with modern day neural networks which look like a driving force for AI, but they have blindspots too. These blindspots could be a unusual ladders that the specific network may not know such as Leela Zero but maybe Elf could have a better understanding and correct judgement of the situation. So you improve in the desire to search ahead as much as you want till you are confident that you feel it is the best move, and usually boils down to in most centaur games is quality of search and deeper understanding of the position, but better improvement to your overall skills is questionable as results will greatly vary.

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Perhaps a better way to use the computer to assist in learning, is if you use Lizzie or GoReviewPartner to go through your games after the game is finished. That way you still get to make mistakes (which you wouldn’t do if you used computer assistence) and see what the consequences of them are. Seeing those consequences will be a stronger reinforcement for not playing the mistake, and also helps more in punishing opponents who play similar mistakes.

Also, if it’s about improving, using computer assistance will probably hurt your reading skills, since you won’t get to practice reading a position yourself as much.

If you really want to play with a bot, why not make a bot account? As far as I know there’s no rules against playing moves yourself with a bot account.

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This may be of interest to you when this year’s edition starts.

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My friend and I do this for teaching games. He is ~24kyu and I am ~11-13kyu. As we play through the game, we are both getting a centaur-assist from various AI bots, but he (the weaker player) is getting help from this version of Leela (rated 4dan out of the box)
https://www.sjeng.org/leela.html

and I am getting help from a slightly weaker online AI which lives here and plays at about a 2dan:
https://chrisc36.github.io/deep-go/

Both have options which show us a heatmap of the 4-5 most likely move responses in any situation. We use this as a teaching aide so that each of us has can

  • evaluate and discuss the levels of risk to all the groups on the board
  • talk about which strategy makes the best sense at that moment (defend? secure? attack? tenuki? big moves? etc)
  • and then select from those available moves and see where that takes the game

It’s nice because having that set of “training wheels” takes some of the ego stuff out of a teaching game. So yeah, I say find someone on a similar level who is willing to do this kind of centaur-assist play with you, and focus on strategic discussion at every move rather than just winning or losing the game. The more you can create a useful narrative for WHY each given move makes sense, the more you can apply those lessons to your un-assisted games.

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