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Subject: Re: Play without books. A good idea ?

Author: Peter McKenzie

Date: 17:15:02 01/13/99

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On January 13, 1999 at 04:24:30, Marc-Philippe HUGET wrote:

>Hi everybody,
>
>	In this moment, I test my program without books, I think it is a good meaning
>in order to test quality of evaluation : pwan development, pieces development,
>etc. Are you agree with me ?
>	For example, Crafty often begins with Knight Nf3 or Nf6 or Nc6.
>
>	This idea is very strange, isn't it ?
>
>	Opinion ?
>
>
>Marc-Philippe Huget

I think I've posted before on this topic but since you asked, here is my
opinion:

I think testing a program without an opening book is only of limited use at
best.

Why spend time on getting your program to play better in the early stages of the
game, when you could be spending time on getting it to play better in the middle
and later stages of the game?

Sure, if your program wants to play the Ruy Lopez all by itself then thats cool
but it may or not mean it will play the middlegame well.  By letting the book
take care of the first few moves, we can concentrate directly on the positions
that really matter.  Also, a decent book will have a good amount of variety
while a deterministic program without a book may get stuck in a narrow range of
positions.

I haven't heard of any of the top chess programmers testing without opening
books.

cheers,
Peter



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