Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: My Impressions of 7 Chess Engines

Author: Dan Homan

Date: 11:49:51 07/28/99

Go up one level in this thread


On July 28, 1999 at 04:18:19, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>
>On July 27, 1999 at 21:13:03, Jeff Anderson wrote:
>
>>I won't try to list how enjoyable the engines were to play, I would probably
>>find it is an intverted list of the strength list.
>
>This is a fascinating comment.
>
>bruce

I think this is why people like personalities in programs like
Chessmaster and PowerChess.  I own PowerChess98 and find the King
(who is supposed to adjust his strength to match yours) to be
a very fun opponent.

Making the computer play like a human opponent with gaps in its
knowledge but a well defined style and plan seems like the best
approach to weakening a program's play.  A next step would be to
have the program "learn" concepts as you use those concepts to
beat it (Powerchess seems to do this).

I am not sure how they do this in Powerchess, but I think the
"learning" of the program is fairly well scripted.  I am not
sure how to do this in a more general way, except perhaps with
TD learning.  Different classes of player personalities (patzer,
club, expert, etc...) could have different values for positional
feature pre-set... Then with TD learning, those personalities could
improve along with the play of the human.  Of course, there
should be a feature to reset or freeze the learning of a personality
if it starts to become too strong.

The only difficulty with TD learning is that it probably takes too
many games to show a noticable improvement.  This is only a guess,
does anyone know how this might work?

 - Dan



This page took 0 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.