Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 20:11:24 03/04/00
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On March 04, 2000 at 20:40:51, Djordje Vidanovic wrote: >On March 04, 2000 at 20:23:24, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>Two issues: >> >>(1) it is only necessary that the program win the game, not win it in the >>shortest number of moves. You entered a raw position, which means there is >>no 'context' of what might be repetitions. It will take many checks before >>it learns which are leading to repetitions, and then starts to migrate the >>king in the right direction, only to avoid the draws. IMHO this is perfectly >>ok, just so it wins and doesn't draw. >> >>(2) tablebases solve this instantly. > >Your two points are quite in order. Still, what I find a little irritating is >the inability of otherwise strong programs to "see" winning sequences in >perfectly plain positions, such as the one I quoted. And that is all. Somehow >I still cannot accept the programs' blindness in such situations, especially if >the path to winning is a matter of a single quick glance for humans. It is >actually the "understanding" of positions that is sometimes so sadly missing in >programs. Therefore I guess that your evaluation of top programs not yet being >GM's is not very far off the mark :-) It is positions like this that may sober >up avid comp chess fans. > >*** Djordje They may or may not yet be GM players. But here, the point is they are most definitely "non-human". IE I am certain Cray Blitz could win that game even if allowed to search only 8 plies per move, because of the unique way it modified the draw score to favor the longest draw, rather than the shortest one. Which will help it find the moves that get the king to the right place eventually. It would sort of "stumble" into the right (winning) position, rather than using reasoning to discover the position. However, a human is real good at answering questions like "name me a flower that rhymes with nose." Does it matter if the computer searches the _entire_ phoenic dictionary for such words, where a human does it associatively? Different approaches. Same result. Maybe computers are just 'different'. :) but not necessarily 'bad'...
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