Author: Don Dailey
Date: 22:03:45 07/15/98
Go up one level in this thread
>>The only interesting question to me is how close is Fritz playing
>>to weak grandmaster chess? (or IS Fritz playing GM chess?)
>>WE cannot reasonably argue about whether Fritz could do it, any
>>player can, we would have to get into statistical analysis of what
>>it's chances are based on how many tournaments it played in a year.
>>And then the argument gets more ambiguous than it already is. That
>>seems to be what we do best though. Endlessly arguing points that
>>cannot be resolved using as ambiguous a language as possible and
>>never defining any terms.
>>
>>Bob posted to me that he was not exaggerating in his belief that
>>micro's were not even close to weak GM strength. Maybe we could
>>take a look at the Aegon games and do a performance rating against
>>all the Grandmasters. Perhaps only the top micro's should be
>>considered in this formula since I believe there is a huge spread
>>among micros. Is this data on the web? We could consider this
>>an upper bound on the strength of top Micro's as of 1 year ago.
>>I say upper bound because the games were not played at long time
>>controls.
>>
>>After we did this then we could have a big argument about how much
>>difference the time control makes.
>>
>>- Don
>
>
>someone did this last year. If you "cherry pick" you will always have a
>couple of "GM" programs. But if you take all the reasonable programs and
>average their TPR's, the result is quite different. And probably much more
>accurate. IE I've had the following results in the past year: Crafty played
>in a game/30 tournament with 4 computers and 4 GM's (Crafty, ferret, two
>others). All the computers finished above the highest-finishing GM. Crafty
>played IGM Walter Browne 4 games at 5/14 (5 minutes +14 seconds increment)
>and it won 3 and lost 1. Unfortunately, I know how it plays, and what it knows,
>and I saw it win one nicely played endgame, saw it tactically out-wizard Walter
>twice, and saw him anti-computer it once and roll it up into a small wad.
>
>Ergo I've had plenty of results good enough to suggest that Crafty is a GM,
>and I could make that claim. But I *know* it isn't. I know *many* of the
>things it can't do...
>
>A GM is something that most here don't understand, but the best word to describe
>them is "balanced". They have no obvious weaknesses, they are strong
>tactically, positionally, know their openings, know their endings well, and so
>forth. Computers have too many holes at present... but they are getting
>better.
We keep beating around the bush. We both seem happy to give very
strong opinions on where they are at without actually giving an
estimated ELO rating of the TOP micro. So I'll start with a lower
bound and you give me an upper bound. From there we will see how
far off we are from each other and whether it's enough to argue
about. I will continue to argue as long as it remains civil and
you are willing (and if you really disagree by as much as it sounds
like you do.)
In my humble opinion, the strongest micro is within 100 rating
points of the weak grandmaster level so I'll say that it's no
weaker than 2400 ELO rating points.
Here is a conversation between Crafty and Cilkchess I overheard
the other day:
Cilkchess: I got beat by a human the other day.
Crafty: What? How did it happen?
Cilkchess: It was one of those damn pattern recognition things
again, I have to give it to them, sometimes that works
in their favor. It's such an ugly way to play the game
but it really throws me off. Maybe that pattern
recoginition thing makes them better?
Crafty: The only thing that matters is that we see so more than
they ever will, *MUCH* more. They have so many holes
in their game it's completely ridiculous.
Cilkchess: I think they do ok. You are underestimating their
strengths.
Crafty: What strengths? They have no strengths that really matter.
Cilkchess: What about pattern recognition which gives them a
powerful selective search?
Crafty: That's not important. It will never make up for the fact
that we have bigger books that we never forget, we search
orders of magnitude more nodes that they do, we *NEVER*
make careless mistakes or get tired. Humans do *ALL* of
these things. They have so many holes in their game
you can drive a Mack truck through. The other day I
chewed one up into tiny pieces and spit him back out.
Cilkchess: But they have a unique way of integrating search with
knowledge that we don't seem to have. Also they seem to
be able to reason things out without using a search.
What about that?
Crafty: So they have a couple unimportant minor advantages. They
have too many weakness that we can exploit. I've seen
and played a lot of games between humans and BELIEVE ME, I
can tell you from experience that they are constantly
getting hammered by oversights, surprise moves (to them)
and time pressure. Until they learn to overcome these
things they will *NEVER* be as good as us.
From Crafty's point of view, we are the ones with weaknesses,
not them. It can see it's own strengths but does not really know
that much about OUR strengths and in fact doesn't consider them
to be very important.
What I'm saying is that computers can still overtake us without
being better in every single way. This is already the case with
me personally. I am not very strong as a chess player and have
never been over 2000 USCF, but I can still see my program make
errors that I would not make. It's getting much rarer now but
it still happens. And yet I am forced to concede that my
program is much better than I am.
- Don
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