Author: Enrique Irazoqui
Date: 02:52:59 12/13/99
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On December 12, 1999 at 18:44:00, Amir Ban wrote: >There are no two schools of thought. That's the fallacy. There are tradeoffs >everywhere, and every programmer tries to strike the right balance. The better >ones manage to find the right compromises, or better yet, to find ingenious ways >to avoid making compromises. By reading and listening to programmers it seems clear that there are indeed these 2 schools of thought: speed vs. knowledge, optimizing for comp-comp vs. optimizing for human-comp. Ed posted several times about this, including in the last few days. Others did too. >Do I understand that your secret test suite is a tactical one ? If so, I don't >believe in it. And nevertheless it worked and the test believes in you. :) The rating of J5 in my test was within 5 points of the rating given by the SSDF. > You would find that J6 scores less than J5 (which didn't score >much higher than J4.6). 42 points in my test. Do you think this is close enough? >So you have that a program can be helped tremendously by its knowledge in >>some given positions, but the same will happen to others in the same or >>different positions and to the same extent. Then the tactical ability will >>prevail, and that's why in the SSDF list the fastest finder is on top, followed >>by the second fastest, and so on. > >That's incredibly simplistic. Do you really think that eveyone's positional >knowledge more or less evens out so tactics prevails ? I really think that tactics is what nmakes the difference in comp-comp. How else can you explain that a tactical test and thousands of comp-comp games give the same results in terms of strength? That's my whole point. If you assume this is true, and so far it has been true, you must reach this conclusion. I repeat what I said before: the ranking in the SSDF list reflects perfectly the tactical speed of programs, so the fastest is first, the second fastes comes second, etc. >I would certainly expect this supposed extra knowledge to show up in comp-comp >games and make a difference, otherwise we have cause to suspect an empty claim >was made. > >I think those who claim that some particular program is specially geared for >comp-human games are aware of a fine record it has, but are ignoring that other >programs have an equal or better record in comp-human events. For example, I >would guess that Junior and Fritz are "prime suspects" for being "comp-comp >specialists", while in fact both have now a long and excellent record against >ranked players (Fritz mostly in active chess). Also, without great statistical >significance, in the WCCC99 two programs, Shredder and Cilkchess, with little >experience against humans drew respectably their GM opponents, while Ferret with >its long record on ICC was the only one to lose. We should put together all games played by people against computers under tournament conditions. The picture we have, or at least the picture I have, is too fragmented to solve the puzzle. Enrique >Amir
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