Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 12:23:30 10/22/00
Go up one level in this thread
> I cannot think of any other purpose for all this other than to improve
> the program's rating in the SSDF.
There is no harm all by itself in being at the top of SSDF.
> You can't possibly use this for
> human players, and you aren't talking about offering playing styles,
> as that is already rampant.
Human players routinely adjust their play to exploit better the stylistic or
capabilty weaknesses of their opponents, programs or humans. Programs aren't as
good (yet) at this kind of 'outside the board' strategizing, but they will get
better.
> Creating a number of personalities to defeat specific opponents would
> require a lot of work and would only be of interest to the
> programmer. Why would I want to have a Rebel especially geared to
> defeat GM Svidler for example?
I wasn't talking about specific opponent but only a specific relative advantage,
no matter who the opponent is (i.e. the program is being tuned to a set of
opponents with particular strength range in particular types of positions). The
usefulness of this is surely greater than just better SSDF rating. After all if
the program adjusts itself to maximize its strength when playing against you (or
whoever else you pit it against), for all you care you're getting a stronger
sparring partner, as if you bought a faster computer and used the same program
without self-tuning.
GT is quite effective against programs which don't have as good king-attack
algorithms, more so than other good king attackers, including regular Tiger,
probably because it does take risks. The proper degree of risk taking ("proper"
meaning as empirically determined) is the performance maximizing strategy. By
taking risks, GT makes positions in which it excells more frequent. While
regular Tiger may be as good, even better, once the king attack is under way, by
virtue of taking fewer risks it won't find itself in a king-attack as often as
GT will. To maximize performance (rating) it is not enough to have an edge in
some area. One has also to try maximizing the frequency of positions in which
one can use that edge, even if some risks are involved.
Now, once you agree that it is reasonable to take some risks in order to
increase frequency of positions in which one will have an edge, and since the
degree of advantage varies for different opponents, the immediate consequence is
that one could do even better if the amount of risk-taking is tuned to the
specific degree of the advantage one has against the current opponent. And that
can be learned in a longer match or hand input if the operator knows the
opponent. For example, GT might perform better against regular Tiger if it were
to play with risk-taking "instinct" minimized.
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