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Subject: Objective method of emulating players and determining relative strength

Author: Christopher R. Dorr

Date: 12:10:04 08/11/99


This is an idea that has interested me for a while, and I was interested in what
others thought of it, and of how it might be implemented.

CM6K (among others) has various 'personalities' that are supposed to play like
various players. Generally, they don't seem to. The changes in playing
parameters are often too coarse, and often seem to be ideas that someone had
about what a player values, rather than being based upon something objective.

What I'd like to do would be to take the entire corpus of a players games (most
great GM's didn't play more than a few thousand recorded games at most), and
analyze them with a very strong program. Have the program determine what it
would play in every given position that the player had to face, and score the
correlation. A score of 1.0 would indicate that the computer chose every move
the player did, a score of .5 would mean that it chose 1/2 the moves the player
did, and 0 would mean that it chose none of the moves that the player did.

Then, we modify a or some variables that the computer uses to evaluate the
position, i.e. center control bonuses, open file bonuses, pawn structure
penalties, piece/pawn values, depths and extensions, and do it again, possibly
using a genetic algorythm approach. Eventually, we will have better and worse
approximations of the player's style. While we may never have an exact
electronic Petrosian, the set of variables that scores a .90 correlation is a
better representative of his style than one that scored .75 (over the body of
his professional games). This would of course take many iterations, and a ton of
computing time to evaluate 3000 games at a reasonable time control, but I feel
that it would generate some useful information.

Once we have some good 'proxies' of great players, we can evaluate some things
about playing strengh. One of my favorites was the old "Morphy was a 'better'
player than Tal" debate, that could never be answered because of a lack of a
common frame of reference.

If my "95% Morphy" plays my "95% Tal", then we can get some objective judgement
about the validity of their respective approaches and philosophies of chess.

At some point, this could have some instructive value as well. When I was
actively teaching chess, I often had an intuitional feel about where a student
needed to improve, but sometimes, I couldn't get a handle on their issues. If I
could 'pollute' my model to play 90% like my 1600 student, I could determine
such things as whether it was consistency, an undervaluation of positional
considerations, or an overvaluation of the attack relative to material, and
hence give some objective targets to attack.

I'd be interested to hear whether anyone else feels that this is feasible, or
just a bad idea, or actually has some promise.

Thanks,

Chris



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