Author: Uri Blass
Date: 14:18:29 03/28/04
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On March 28, 2004 at 16:18:41, Artem Pyatakov wrote: >Hello CCC, > >I have not posted here in about 3 years, but it's nice to be posting again. My >college years have flown by, and I am now using the amateur program I had >written during the summer of my Freshman year as a basis for my Senior thesis. >Where did the time go?!? > >I wanted to get your educated input on the topic I am covering in my thesis, >before I actually get down to writing the actual text of it (I have spent some >pretty large number of hours during the year working on the experimental >results). Disclaimer: The ideas contained below are pretty self-critical of the >field, but please do not take them personally, since I myself have written a >chess program that has all the shortcomings I talk about. I am purposefully >trying to be controversial here, so as to spur debate. Any input at all is very >much appreciated. > >The thesis is titled "Improving Computer Chess through Machine Learning", and >its main idea is to attack one aspect of an interesting gap I noticed between >the field of A.I. and Computer Chess. Specifically, in my opinion, the field of >computer chess has become obsessed with *tricks* (human-generated ideas that >happened to work without a good theoretical justification and cannot be easily >generalized to other games). Because these tricks work really really well, the >field has strayed from research into A.I. techniques. At the same time, any AI >work has to compare itself with chess engine filled with excellent >human-generated tricks, so it seems to perform poorly. >Some examples: >*ordering captures first during move ordering >*check extensions >*futility pruning I think futility pruning can be easily generalized for other games. I also think that history based pruning and using history tables and killer moves can be generalized for other games. >*evaluation function (trick-filled, but probably has to stay that way for a >while) >On the other hand, I think a lot of researchers have been overly ambitious and >have tried to replace Alpha-Beta & tricks with a neural network or some totally >different approach. I see no reason to replace alphabeta with something totally different. Humans use alpha beta in every game and I see no reason to tell computers not to use alphabeta and if they find that a move is bad to spend a lot of time on trying to evaluate exactly how bad it is. Uri
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