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Subject: Re: Knowledge again, but what is it?

Author: Jay Scott

Date: 19:00:04 02/25/98

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On February 25, 1998 at 18:16:51, Amir Ban wrote:

>On February 25, 1998 at 17:23:52, Jay Scott wrote:
>
>
>>A chess program is in an exactly analogous position. It would
>>like to be as discriminating as possible while staying well-
>>calibrated.
>>
>>I don't think it's a serious problem in practice. You can
>>measure everything from game data.
>>
>
>I don't understand this part: Are you saying my best-fit method would
>give good results in practice ? Or do you have a different procedure in
>mind ?

If you have an actual program with an actual evaluation function,
you can collect data by playing games and find out whether the
evaluator is well-calibrated (accurate but possibly vague) and
whether it's what I've called discriminating (precise but possibly
inaccurate; claiming to know more than it does, if you like).

To me it seems pretty clear that in theory you can always adjust
an evaluator to be well-calibrated, using the game data, and that
it's not going to hurt to do that (at least not on average). So the
idea is to make the evaluator as discriminating as possible without
losing accuracy.

Also, I think a statistically valid best-fit procedure will tend
to do this automatically, as it were, so it seems like a good
idea to me. One of the tricky parts is to fit to data that
corresponds to the situations your program actually has to make
decisions about--I think this may be harder than it seems. The
popular idea of fitting to grandmaster games is probably bad
for chess programs, for example, because they're so different
from grandmasters.

  Jay



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