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Subject: Opening Books / Tablebases

Author: Adrien Regimbald

Date: 19:18:37 05/08/00


Hello,

I think that restricting computer engines in a tournament with humans is
rediculous.

- Some human players is that they are an "external resource".  This is
nitpicking over details - a program could easily include such information within
the binary itself.
- Some human players complain about not having an opening book or endgame
tablebases to use themselves.  There may be some reasonable argument here ..
computer programmers will argue that the humans had a chance to learn the
openings / endings through books and have memorized the openings / endgame
techniques .. the humans will argue that they don't have perfect recall of this
information

It seems to me that it is only reasonable to allow the computers access to
opening books / endgame tablebases as needed.  Perhaps human players will be up
in arms about it, but it is an extremely unfair handicap for a computer to be
playing against (for example) a GM who has spent their life memorizing the
latest and greatest variations in all of their openings.

To show how rediculous the perfect recall argument is - if you take this far
enough, human players aren't given diagrams when they play of where the pieces
are best, and humans can't always remember this, so computer shouldn't be able
to have these internal tables of piece/square bonuses for positional evaluation.
 If we continue this far enough, a computer's eval would be completely
disallowed, as humans aren't even given piece values when they sit down to play.

I mean, really, come on - it's quite rediculous.  If you took 2 GM strength
players, and you somehow had the ability to take away all the variations that
one GM had memorized, and all of the familiar endgame positions, who do you
think would win?  That's exactly what is being done to the computers being
forced to make concessions concerning opening books / endgame tablebases.

As an author of an engine myself, I get quite incensed when people say my
program is "cheating" by using an opening book.

What is the opinion of other authors on this?


Regards,
Adrien.



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