What we need are more sides to the argument. I'm pretty sure you're both off.
zahlman doesn't seem to have read the part of the paper dealing with cyclic adversaries, but the cyclic adversary strategy doesn't depend on KataGo mis-classifying alive or dead groups over long time horizons. If you watch the example games play out, KataGo kills the stones successfully and is trivially winning for most of the game. It makes a short term & devastating mistake where it doesn't seem to understand that it has a shortage of liberties and lets the adversary kill a huge group in a stupid way.
The mistake KataGo makes doesn't have anything to do with long move horizons, on a long time horizon it still plays excellently. The short horizon is where it mucks up.
I don't suppose you could directly link to a position? It would be interesting to see KataGo make a blunder of the sort you describe, because traditional Go engines were able to avoid them many years ago.
Consider the first diagram in the linked paper (a, pg 2). It is pretty obvious that black could have killed the internal group in the top-right corner at any time for ~26 points. That'd be about enough to tip the game. Instead somehow black's group died giving white ~100 points and white wins easily. Black would have had ~50 moves to kill the internal group.
Or if you want a replay, try https://goattack.far.ai/adversarial-policy-katago#contents - the last game (KataGo with 10,000,000 visits
- https://goattack.far.ai/adversarial-policy-katago#10mil_visi...} - game 1 in the table) shows KataGo with a trivially winning position around move 200 that it then throws away with a baffling sequence of about 20 moves. I'm pretty sure even as late as move 223 KataGo has an easily winning position, looks like it wins the capture race in the extreme lower left. It would have figured out the game was over by the capture 8 moves later.
So dead man walking is a bad description. From your perspective it's still KataGo winning but a series of serious blunders that occurs in these attacks positions.
zahlman doesn't seem to have read the part of the paper dealing with cyclic adversaries, but the cyclic adversary strategy doesn't depend on KataGo mis-classifying alive or dead groups over long time horizons. If you watch the example games play out, KataGo kills the stones successfully and is trivially winning for most of the game. It makes a short term & devastating mistake where it doesn't seem to understand that it has a shortage of liberties and lets the adversary kill a huge group in a stupid way.
The mistake KataGo makes doesn't have anything to do with long move horizons, on a long time horizon it still plays excellently. The short horizon is where it mucks up.