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Subject: Re: Who is the strongest OTB chess player at CCC?

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 07:08:04 02/14/04

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On February 14, 2004 at 09:42:42, Uri Blass wrote:

>On February 14, 2004 at 07:51:01, Peter Fendrich wrote:
>
>>On February 13, 2004 at 10:35:06, Uri Blass wrote:
>>
>>>On February 13, 2004 at 10:13:26, Peter Fendrich wrote:
>>>
>>>>On February 13, 2004 at 00:28:13, Paul Doire wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Hi All,
>>>>>
>>>>>I am interested in knowing the strengths of all who post here.
>>>>>Whether it is USCF or FIDE.To import chess knowledge into chess programs
>>>>>seems to require the programmer to be strong or at minimum, their resources to
>>>>>be strong. Who dares to tell...and dares to tell of those who will not tell.
>>>>>Some human analysis we see would carry more weight knowing the strength of the
>>>>>analyst. Do you dare to tell?
>>>>>
>>>>>Regards,
>>>>>Paul
>>>>
>>>>I'm quite convinced that the correlation between being a strong chess player and
>>>>a strong chess programmer is not very high. It's far more important to be a good
>>>>programmer than a good chess player in order to produce a strong chess program.
>>>>Of course the programmer must have rather good knowledge about different chess
>>>>elements but that is not at all the same as being strong in OTB play. I even
>>>>beleive that a very strong OTB player might have some troubles to lower his
>>>>level of play to the level of an evaluation function in a chess program...
>>>>/Peter
>>>
>>>I do not agree with the last claim.
>>>strong players do not need to lower their level of play.
>>>
>>>Even 1500 players know about fortress positions when most chess engines do not
>>>have the knowledge.
>>>
>>>This is not a problem for the programmers so for the same reason the fact that
>>>some programmer is a strong player should not be a problem.
>>>
>>>
>>>If you try to teach a chess program everything that you know you have problems
>>>and the question if you are a strong player or not strong player is not
>>>important and the problem is that you simply do not know to give definitions to
>>>your knowledge.
>>>
>>>Uri
>>
>>I really shouldn't speak for others than myself but I had some troubles with
>>that and I think that a very strong OTB player might have the same or even more
>>of it.
>>Not a big obstacle compared to all others but it's one of them...
>>/Peter
>
>Movei does not know a lot of things that I know but at these days I decided to
>try to teach it things that I do not know about KPK endgame(I know that it is
>not the best way to improve the program as fast as possible).
>
>I try to write a function that will get the position and give me the result win
>draw without looking at a table.
>
>I use Dieter's table for debugging my program.
>
>At this point I have almost 500 lines of code when most of them are for white to
>move and still have 3000 cases when I return do not know as an answer.
>
>I only look at positions when the pawn is white pawn in column a,b,c,d and the
>black king is not in check so I still have a lot of undecided cases.
>
>There is probably better ways to improve the program but I want at least to
>solve the problem of one simple endgame not by tables.
>
>I try to get progress in 2 directions:
>
>1)inventing more rules for undecided cases(I look at the first undecided
>position and try to define a rule based on it but unfortunately there are cases
>when the rule is only good for less than 1% of the remaining position).
>2)trying to look at my code to see if I can generalize rules to do the code
>shorter(I am practically sure that it is possible).
>
>Uri

Note also that one of the nice effects of 2 is sometimes solving part of the
unsolved positions because I generalize also cases that I did not consider.

Now I have only 2916 undecided positions with white to move
1634 out of them are wins for white.

With black to move I have 36604 undecided positions but I decided to work first
on white to move and I almost did nothing with black to move.

Uri
Uri



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