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Subject: Re: Whats the expert opinion?

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 09:53:57 03/10/00

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On March 10, 2000 at 11:50:42, Soren Riis wrote:

>I am a mathematician on IM level who only have
>done armature work (like testing evaluation
>functions etc) in chess programming.
>
>I would like to hear the expert opinion on the
>following questions:
>
>It is well known that programs which have the same
>strength at one time control, might have different
>strengths at different time controls. Or equivalently
>that two programs relative strength might depend on
>the speed of the hardware.
>
>Q1: What is factors contribute to this?
>
>Humans players, when compared to programs plays relatively
>better with long time controls. While a program increase
>its strength by typically 70 rating points when the speed is
>doubled, the human (for fast time controls like 5 min) rather
>seem to gain 200 rating points when the speed, so to speak, is
>doubled (i.e. when the available time is doubled).
>This suggest that with slow speed computers also gain much more
>than 70 rating points. Is this correct?
>
>Q2: Does very knowledge strong program gain more playing strength
>relative to less knowledge strong programs (on slow processors)?
>
>On fast processors knowledge is sometimes even a disadvantage.
>
>Q3: How does knowledge fare as a function of speed?
>
>The questions are a bit vague, but I would like to hear the
>expert opinions. Any thoughts?

There's never been any consensus as to what knowledge is.  People assume that
programs with low NPS are high knowledge programs, but these programs could be
doing tactical evaluation that may as well be search.

If I have a program that evaluates at the tips, maybe it will do 200K nps.  But
if I suddenly decide that my "eval function" is the last three plies of search,
it will fall to a few K nps.  It didn't get any more knowledeable.

bruce




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