Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 12:48:18 12/27/99
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On December 27, 1999 at 14:57:09, Ed Schröder wrote: >How to judge? > >>Posted by walter irvin on December 27, 1999 at 12:26:07: > >>rebel century is extremely strong ,i dont play it as much as some of the other >>ones i have for 2 reasons .1.rebel never lets me get anything going unlike >>hiarcs,fritz,crafty ect . vs them i feel like i have a chance till the end .2. >>rebels style is devoid of brilliat moves or moves that ever leave the position >>unclear .instead its like the program has a roll of duct tape and he slowly >>but surely wraps you up till you have no options left .for me rebel is the >hardest to beat ,in fact so far its the only one i have not beat . > >At least once a week I receive email in similar wordings. That's of course >very nice stuff to read but what puzzles me is Rebel's progress through the >years in this respect. > >I mean this: I am a 1800 player, very bad in tactics but with a positional >understanding of 2000, maybe a bit more. How to judge progress in Rebel's >positional understanding every time I add new chess knowledge? Statistically spoken you should not even near to 1500 Ed. Non actively chess playing people are hugely overestimating their chessstrength/insight. I can't find you at any dutch rating list, so my assumption is that you're one of those guys. Working on a chess engine sure doesn't improve playing strength, as you let the program solve stuff instead of solving it yourself. If i have worked on diep in the afternoon, then in the evening i play like big shit to be objectively measuring what happens... >Has Rebel improved in playing humans since version 8,9,10 and now Rebel >Century? To answer this question precise you have to realize that hardware >has improved too during the years and people tend not to play old versions >which makes it even more difficult to judge its progress. Very accurate said. Apart from that another aspect needs not to be forgotten: i am used now to fight against crafty at duals and misssilicon at a K6-3, and Hossa at its latest hardware. If i then get against an oldie, i will suddenly do a lot better than i would have done in the past. So where humans have adjusted to the stronger programs, advances in theory, and some other things, the program is still showing the same performance. >Since times I use the following guide-line to decide which version is best: >- test sets (about 1000 positions) 30% as a first impression. ECM+BK nowadays? >- auto232 results (30%) >- my personal impression based on my own style and feelings (40%) this >includes the GM challenge games as well. >How do other programmers decide which version is best? and maybe more >important which criteria is involved? I test carefully what the evaluation verbosely prints in a position where the bugfixes to the patterns applies to. Positions it played wrong in the past (5000 or something and growing each day nearly, but i only pick a few from which i think apply). Then it's released to my testers and depending upon their results and my findings i fix bugs in it and decide where to expand again. When talking about a non-lineair change of search however i feel it's not so easy to decide. Let's take for example last ply pruning. It's easy to make last ply pruning such that it does a lot better at testsets. But does it play better then? I find that hard to judge. I have simply thrown all forward pruning out of DIEP and feel a lot more happier. It plays a lot better now, but has a way lower rating in blitz at single cpu machines at icc, the advantage in playing strength can be basically is in my opinion because of evaluation bugfixes. >I also am curious on opinions if Rebel Century is clearly better than let's >say Rebel8 when the subject is playing style which is something different >than playing strength (my opinion and view). I personally feel century is the same engine with a few more tactical extensions and a new book. So i see hardly difference, considering that tactical testsets like ECM, which were solved very bad by rebel8, do not get taken into account in my judgement of engine strength, as i found rebel8 already anything but tactical weak. >Ed Vincent
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