[gwern]

> The KataGo paper (the paper you linked) is one exception to this.

And my point is that KataGo shows that if you make the relatively minor architectural changes necessary to do this at all, it works just fine. None of the other tweaks it makes, useful as they may be, have anything to do with fixing transfer learning, because there's nothing to fix. It's a pretty absurd claim to claim that a CNN which works fine on 19x19 will suddenly collapse and show no transfer on, say, 17x17, and KataGo demonstrates that this does not happen.

> Also, if something is obvious but never seems to make it to publication the chances are someone has tried and it didn't work as expected so they shelved the paper.

'What if Go but rectangular boards' is pretty dumb when you have chess and shogi and other domains showing that A0 works, so I feel confident that no one like DM seriously tried and simply buried their failures. (Publication bias requires there to be a literature that can be differentially published, and competition presumes the existence of >0 entities competing; there is no active field of 'rectangular Go'.)