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

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 13:52:43 08/19/03

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On August 18, 2003 at 22:28:10, Johan de Koning wrote:

>>>Time control is not an issue here since.
>>
>>How so?
>
>It seems I forgot 6 backspaces. :-) I should have better replaced the entire
>line with: Why do you emphasize short time controls?

I don't think I emphasize it particularly.
What I don't want is things being skewed on the time control, and I think if you
have too big a search preperation time, then it is going to affect things in
fast games, at least I don't see how that can be avoided.
What I really want is zero startup time, and 100% pure search, otherwise things
look weird in my testing.

>As GCP allready replied, clearing needn't take time. Eg a 1-bit age count in
>each entry will do the job. Also the nature of the search is the same for both
>bullet and correspondence time controls. The one thing I can think of is that
>with short time control and large TT there will be very few overwrites.

If you swear this is faster, I will take your word for it, but off hand I don't
see why it should be the case.
You still need to plow through every single hash entry, with latency and all
that comes with it. Streaming is faster than random access, but why is clearing
one bit faster than memsetting the whole thing?
Clearing one bit is actually more complicated, requiring loops (with
conditionals) and logic, unless of course you have very big entries.

Okay, I _could_ do the test and see for myself, but nah... ;)

>[...]
>
>>I have come to learn, that chess is really a game of chance, everything being
>>horizon limited makes it all pretty random anyhow.
>
>Certainly.
>Or if you like: I agree chess is very likely a game of chance.
>
>> Maybe pridictability is even
>>a bad thing here, it disrupts the natural laws of statistics, making it possibly
>>even harder to test.
>
>I think now you're stretching it. :-)

Actually, I was semi serious. :)

Suppose you do a gauntlet of 5000 games.
Now you change a small parameter and play again.

So now you get 5000 more games, but of those 4800 might be exactly the same
because the change of parameter didn't affect them (you are determanistic so you
will get the same games under the same conditions a priori).
So in effect you only played 200 games. 200 games is not enough to see anything
so you have to play again, but now you get the same 5000 games as last time,
this is pointless!

So how do you move on, how do you collect data without randomizing at some
point, be it in book or otherwise?

-S.
>... Johan



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