So I would like people watching games to be able to see who is currently winning. It would also be great for streamers to be able to add this to their streams. (Perhaps if analyze is on then it shows the current score?)
I do know this would require a lot of processing power. So would it be possible to do without going into deep analysis? Maybe 500 playouts just on this one move not the whole game. If it’s low enough I would expect it to be instantaneous.
If not, does someone have an alternate solution to showing who is winning the game while it is being played live? I think viewing games would be a lot better if the players could follow it better.
Maybe that could be a feature that applies only to some special games, such as relayed games or streaming.
I fear that could be an issue for regular games because of calculation effort and cheaters.
Wow, I can imagine a whole new wave of cheating issues!
But NOPE, because a player could just have another browser open, being logged out there, and thus able to see those scores.
Same goes, IMHO, for relayed live games because, you know, there would quite probably be ways for some people to relay such information back to the players.
Like … for example, <wink wink> and <cough cough>. All we’d need is to agree on which is which.
<edit>
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, at this moment in time, not any official statement. </edit>
Well, nothing new, anyone can have already a katago delivering the same info.
I d say it would be more a nice gesture to give access to all spectators who can’t afford it.
Sure, there are always way to cheat, but the point is not to facilitate it.
Some people will be tempted to cheat occasionally if it’s a one-click process, while they wouldn’t bother replicating everything in Katago in another program, both because they are lazy and because the more steps you have to go through, the more your actions really feel like cheating.
I completely disagree with this mindset. If I was going to cheat having the AI open on my desktop is an easy solution.
Now I’m not suggesting having recommended moves or anything, but just an accurate score estimator. EVEN if it is shown to the players it’s not that big of a deal. Chess does this already, strong players will already know the score so it only helps weaker players who probably need it, and Tygem already does this with cartoon faces.
I really think the cons are super small and there are a lot of benefits to having it.
Are you referring to the automatic counting up of captured material which is common on chess servers? I would say this is pretty exactly equivalent to showing number of captured stones in go.
On the other hand, showing a score estimate from a superhuman AI is more equivalent to showing the eval bar to the players in chess, which would be a huge help to even the strongest players (for instance, getting a hint that the opponents last move was a blunder, because the eval suddenly dropped, is super helpful).
So yes, players having easy access to accurate score is a big concern. But as others have said, we crossed that bridge on OGS already with making the KataGo estimate available to viewers… it wouldn’t necessarily be much worse to automatically do the score estimate on each move instead of requiring viewers to press a button for it.
However, making it even slightly easier to cheat can actually make a big difference in how many players cheat, for the reasons @qnpnpmqppnp outlined, so we would have to weigh that against the possible improvement in viewing experience.
My opponent played there and lost 10 points estimate.
At my level it will often give hints that there are urgent moves on the board. It basically penalizes the first player don’t seeing that move/region. If it’s a problem or not is mostly a policy decision. Getting direct feedback can help the learning process, but interferes with the game progress by giving hints to the opponent.
I can see how showing it to the players may be bad from the opinions above, but I still think viewers should be able to see it. If people are going to cheat, they are going to cheat.
It is not merely a matter of people cheating. More important is that it misleads beginners into thinking that it is acceptable to have their counting done for them, while also muddying the clarity of “no outside help.”
