Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: "unintended features" very funny ;-) NT

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 02:17:09 08/15/03

Go up one level in this thread


On August 15, 2003 at 03:02:22, Johan de Koning wrote:

>On August 14, 2003 at 03:33:14, Georg v. Zimmermann wrote:
>
>>nt
>
>Thanks for appreciating my choice of words. :-)
>There is however more to it than just fun, I wanted to avoid the B-word.
>
>Bug: a piece of code that does not do what the programer intended.
>UF : a piece of code that does exactly what the programmer intended.
>
>... Johan

I understand you point, but I think the price is too high.

Clearing TTs makes the engine, IMO, significantly weaker at short time controls.
It is simply too expensive to throw away the little information the engine has
collected, and the fraction of a second the clearing itself takes is no small
handicap (guess there are tricks to speed this up? :).

It also makes backwards (=retograde?) analysis impossible, and as Gian-Carlo
mentioned smp is not possible to do in a determanistic manner.

I have a such a determanism on/off variable, simply a flag the user can edit to
ask for clearing of TTs and killers etc. before every move.
This is half way debug mode in my opinion though.

Lastly, I think the engine should be more than just a dumb analysis tool.
Why shouldn't the engine change it's style if it's opponent is very low rated or
has very little time left on the clock?
What about learning so the engine never makes the same mistake twice?

Those are (non-determanistic) factors that humans consider, so why shouldn't we
attempt to mimic these ideas, some of them might be powerful indeed! :)

-S.



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.