Author: Uri Blass
Date: 10:20:28 05/07/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 07, 2002 at 12:53:13, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On May 06, 2002 at 13:09:45, Christophe Theron wrote: > >>On May 06, 2002 at 01:05:23, Uri Blass wrote: >> >>>On May 05, 2002 at 19:58:09, Christophe Theron wrote: >>> >>>>On May 05, 2002 at 19:25:07, stuart taylor wrote: >>>> >>>>>I mean, where are we? I cannot make it out yet. >>>>>Can we safely say that a top program of today can beat all programs from before >>>>>1996, i.e. 1995 and below? >>>> >>>> >>>>Year of release? >>>> >>>>Wrong thinking. >>>> >>>>What you need to consider is the number of years the programmer has spent >>>>actively working on his program. >>>> >>>>That gives much better figures. >>>> >>>>Genius 5 is a program of 1996, but it represents approximately 15 years of hard >>>>work by Richard Lang. >>>> >>>>Now consider an amateur program of 2002, on which the programmer works since >>>>1996. >>>> >>>>Are you going to compare 1996 and 2002 and decide that the 2002 program is >>>>probably better? >>> >>>The amateur of 2002 has the advantage that the programmer could get more ideas >>>about programming from reading and also could do better testing thanks to better >>>hardware and software. >>> >>>I can give you one example for the last point and it was about testing to find >>>bugs in my move generator: >>> >>>There are a lot of programs that calculate today the perft function for every >>>position(perft 6 is the number of legal games of 6 moves from the position) . >>>They helped to find bugs in my complicated move generator(if I see that perft 5 >>>is not correct then I can find the bug by finding a position when perft 4 is >>>wrong,finding a position when perft 3 is wrong...). >>> >>>I guess that many years ago there was no free software to calculate that >>>function and even if there was software to do it the hardware caused it to be >>>clearly slower so testing and finding bugs was an harder task. >>> >>>>about when they talk about knowledge) makes for 10% of the strength of a chess >>>>program. >>>> >>>>Chess is 90% about tactics (which is a concept close to "search"). >>> >>>It is possible that evaluation may be more important but programmers failed to >>>write the right evaluation to prove it. >> >> >>You are right. >> >>I consider that current top chess programs, compared to top human chess players, >>are at the 50% level in search and 20% in evaluation. >> >>I do not even know if it is 50/20, considering that top human ches players, who >>are thousands of times slower, can equal or dominate the top chess programs >>running on top hardware. >> >>So there is ample room for improving, that's the good news. >> >>But I still believe that the proportion in chess is 90% importance for search >>and 10% for evaluation. >> >>There is more room for improvement in evaluation (in percentage relative to the >>skills of human players), but it still represents a minor part compared to >>potential improvements in search. >> >> >> >> Christophe > >for chessprograms things are different. Not a single one of them >misses obvious tricks nowadays. It's book + evaluation dominated simply. The main advantage of searching deeper is not obvious tricks. It can be better positional moves and it can be tricks that are not obvious. I think that in most comp-comp games between equal programs if you give the losers to search 2 plies deeper when the winner search to the same depth that they searched in the game then you are going to see different results. book dominates? I think that most programmers are going to prefer to play with no book if their hardware is 3 times faster. I think that it includes also christophe but christophe can tell if I am wrong. Uri
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