Author: Amir Ban
Date: 04:01:20 07/21/98
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 1998 at 21:34:57, Don Dailey wrote: >Although I don't have the same respect for Deep Thought that Bob Hyatt >does, I still have a lot of respect for it. It has beaten my program >twice, and both times probably prevented my program from becoming >world champion. Two games is a small sample to be sure, but common >sense makes me believe this was no fluke. > I still wonder sometime why you played 14...Kh8? against it in Hong-Kong. In the opening at least, DB made every effort to lose this game. Didn't you want to win it ? >I don't think Deep Thought (or Deep Blue) is invincible and you would >see many wins and draws against it but I have no doubt it would >still dominate the micro's. Murray estimated his odds of winning >that championship at about 50/50. He recognized that Deep Blue would >be a heavy favorite in any single game but that dodging 5 bullets >is a harder task. I was more optimistic than even they were, >thinking Deep Thought had about a 70% chance of winning. As it >turned out they drew a game and lost a game and this put them out >of it. That's exactly what happened to me, in the same tournament. So I figure that I, too, must have had 70% chance of winning. Right ? I've heard these sort of arguments before, and they are nonsense. The same sort of arguments were used to show that Fritz, who won, had a 10% or so chance of winning the tournament. If you listen to these arguments carefully, you will be convinced that this tournament not only does not weaken Deep-Blue's standing as the best chess computer, but actually reinforces it. The thesis behind these arguments is approximately this: Deep-Blue is self-evidently the strongest, it scored this result in this tournament, so let's compute the probability for the result. Interestingly enough, the people making this argument do not seem interested in revising or qualifying their premise that Deep-Blue is strongest. You would think that holding a tournament is done precisely with the aim of getting a better estimate of who is stronger and who is weaker. We'll never know if Deep-Blue was unlucky to score only 3.5 points, or lucky to score so many. The default assumption is that it scored just what it deserved, and there is no other scientific conclusion of any significance. The unspectacular quality of its games in this tournament also more or less agrees with the result. Amir
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