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Subject: Re: Trade off in strength for blitz vs Standard concerning Ferret??

Author: Shaun Graham

Date: 21:10:39 08/07/98

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On August 07, 1998 at 18:17:45, Christophe Theron wrote:

>On August 07, 1998 at 15:48:43, Shaun Graham wrote:
>
>>  Is there a trade off in strength that "can or perhaps does" occurs for
>>programs that play blitz exceptionally well, when it comes to playing standard
>>games?  For instance Genius is held by many to be the best blitz player, my
>>feeling is, that this is simply due to it's excessive tendency to play
>>defensively(defense comes quick to genius).  This makes it considerably more
>>difficult to form a constructive plan of activity, which in the end results in
>>opponents falling too short of time and losing.  However this strength which
>>makes it so great at blitz also is one of the main causes for it falling behind
>>the other top programs(IMHO).
>
>
>I think differently. Genius strength in blitz comes from its search algorithm.
>Genius and its predecessors were designed to play the best on slow hardware
>(Mephisto computers), and Lang's search was designed at that time. And was the
>best.
>
>The result is that Genius sees many long combinations instantly, but it has a
>bigger branching factor. As time controls become longer, the branching factor
>becomes a problem and other programs are able to go as deep, or even deeper than
>Genius.
>
>It is also possible that the defensive behaviour you describe comes from the way
>the last plies of the search are treated. Computers moves are not processed in
>the same way as opponent's in the last plies of the selective search. However I
>don't think it is the reason why Genius is so good in blitz games.
>
>
>
Someone not too long ago posted a quite detailed description of how Genius does
it's analysis.  Indeed according to my memory of the post Genius does analyse
it's opponents move differently than it analyses it's own(i'm not sure if this
is common practice or not among other programs).  I'm certainly not as expert on
programming as you Christophe, but i do believe that the search strategy
employed by genius does often result in a defensive behavior were less weakneses
are created, thus making it much more difficult to find a constructive plan, and
thus slowing down the opponent(at least when human).
  Really though the general question i was asking is there a trade off that can
or perhaps does occur, in current programs when it comes to a program being good
at blitz and Standard?  For example i was attempting to describe, how perhaps
the features that cause genius to be so good at blitz are perhaps the same exact
features that cause it to perhaps be less good than some other top programs at
standard time controls(40/2).

Shaun
    Christophe
>
>
>>  Ferret at it's best had an astonishing 3129 blitz rating on ICC(it has a high
>>standard rating as well)!  I'm just wondering about this question because of the
>>upcoming match with Marovic.  Ed Shroeder mentioned that this match "would" tell
>>us something more about how far programs are, for this to be the case it would
>>seem necessary for ferret to be a top standard computer player.  Is it?  I
>>personally think we could learn the most from a match with a bare bones average
>>GM who maintains consistently a average rating of 2500.  For the reason that a
>>GM of Marovic's caliber might dessimate Ferret even if it does play at GM
>>strength.



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