Author: Graham Laight
Date: 04:05:45 10/10/00
It seems to me that PCs' results against GMs are tapering off into a flat line. The current style of program may have come as far as they can go. The battle to generate the highest NPS score is no longer improving the computers' performance against humans. Even Deep Junior running on a quad processor is only able to score 4.5/9 against the top players. With dozens of programmers competing to make the "final push" to get programs ahead of humans, to impartial observers it looks like the harder they push, the more the bandwagon gets stuck in the mud. Programmers also have to remove knowledge from their eval fns to score higher against their computer opponents. Looks like a doubling of NPS no longer provides an extra 50 Elo rating against humans - nothing even close, in fact. I wonder whether some of our common assumptions about how speed and knowledge affect ELO ratings are wrong. I think we mostly assume that the return on both knowledge and speed look like the picture below: | | | ** | ************************** | ** ELO | * | * | * | * | * | * | * |* |* |* |--------------------------------------------------------------- Either Speed or Knowledge But what if, in reality, one or both of them actually looked like this? | * | * | * | * | ** | * | * | * | * | * | ** | * | * | * | * | * | * | ** | * | * | * | * | * ELO | * | * | ** | * | * |* |* |--------------------------------------------------------------- Either Speed or Knowledge In other words, shooting up, plateauing for a while, then shooting up again - and so on. It's possible that, because chess programmers vary the amount of expertise between 20 and (say) 500 distinct pieces of knowledge, they've found a plateau (probably the 2nd one), and, angry about being beaten by someone with less knowledge but higher NPS, have refused to go down the knowledge route seriously. Also, from many years of reading postings in this group, it is apparent that NPS, and techniques to raise it, is where the focus lies with this particular group of people. Could it be that, for all these years, we've allowed ourselves to be fooled by the apparent "computer friendliness" of chess, followed the same path progressively, and neglected to address the problems with knowledge coding, knowledge selection (during the game), and knowledge acquisition - which are themselves very interesting computing problems? Clinching evidence: humans are still able to beat computers. They aren't using NPS, therefore they must be using knowledge. -g
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