Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 15:33:32 05/21/01
Go up one level in this thread
> I flip a coin 5 times and it comes up heads every time. > Does that mean the coin is biased? It is not as simple as a coin toss. If all you extract out of 100+ plies played in a game is the result (one of values 1,0.5,0), then you're wasting 99.9.. percent of available information. You can play a single game against, say, a GM and you will know a few moves after the opening that you're dealing with a player much stronger than you. Or, playing against a complete novice, you can again easily guess that his/her rating is much lower than yours, even though not a single game has been finished, and according to your chess==coin_tossing theory, there is zero information available. We have also all seen quite accurate ratings of programs extracted after only few dozen next-move evaluations (e.g. with well calibrated test suites). A single game has often several times more positions that program has evaluated, therefore the information is there even after a single game to get the prgram's rating within a 50-100 points. The only model in which your coin tossing theory of chess is meaningful is a mindless rating estimator taking in only 1.58 bits of information per game (log2(3)), i.e. the final game outcome and nothing else. Looking through that kind of tiny pinhole anything you look at will look random and senseless.
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