How big to avoid AIs?

[yebellz]

The modern approach to building strong AI engines is not fundamentally limited to only 19x19, but can be generalized to larger boards as well.

KataGo is an engine that supports custom board sizes. Here is a post from the author of that engine talking about its performance on larger boards:

Large board go (21x21 and up)

Funnily enough, AIs can be strong on large boards without ever training on them. Recently released a version of KataGo’s code that works up to 29x29, and the same neural nets in the current run that were only trained on 7x7 through 19x19 seem to work okay on the larger boards. https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo/releases/tag/v1.3.5%2Bbs29 One key to making this work is actually that convolutional nets don’t physically care what the board size is. You feed in the board as essentially a…