Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 14:32:36 08/11/99
Go up one level in this thread
On August 11, 1999 at 15:10:04, Christopher R. Dorr wrote: >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. interesting method, main problem is you need some strong chessplayers to determine what are the best moves. In principle a computerprogram is objective. So if the GM (like kramnik against kasparov is a famous example) choses a safe move which wins chanceless, but computer prefers to put mate in 7, then we have a major problem. If a player (GM) loses because of his style, then is that taken into account of the model? I personally think it's very hard to make such a system, and computers will more like each other than match a certain GM. So a computer that gets the credit for playing like for example andersson, for sure looks like perhaps 30% at this man, where it matches other programs for 80%. If that's the case then i have personally a major problem with it to call that computer "andersson style". It's like putting the mark "sportscar of the year" at the space shuttle as it looked more like a mercedes sportscar than the russian shuttle 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
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.