Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 19:45:52 01/11/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 11, 2000 at 18:25:44, Mark Young wrote: >No one is just talking about one game, i agree any program can have a bad game, >even Ferret, and you know my opinion on Ferret. And it has nothing to do with >like or dislike of the programmer. I judge Ferret on what it shows me in games, >as I do with Crafty. And I don't think it is smear to express ones opinion on >any program as long as it is accurate. The only smear I seen was to the person >who wrote one article and devoted a few words to Crafty that were accurate. Now >some on this board think it is insane to say Crafty is weaker then the top >commercial programs, and it is smear to explain why it is weaker. So I think the >only way to resolve a dispute like this is with some games. I didn't like Cock's article because I thought it used bad data to try to support a proposition that Crafty was weak. I don't say that I am going to fight to the death to prevent anyone from presenting that proposition. Pick a random person who doesn't like Bob, and have them write an article about Crafty. Do you think it is possible that there'd be little truth in the article, even if every sentence in the article were literally true? I can easily believe this. Just take that Hiarcs-Ferret game and annotate it as if white is brilliant and black is completely incompetent, and you'd have an article that is factually true and yet allows hugely different conclusions than if you write the same article about Ferret-Fritz. Perhaps the issue here is that Cock raised doubts in my mind about his motives because of the way he presented his case. Even if everything is true I think the article still stunk. Notice that I didn't argue against the truth of the article, since I don't know if it is true or not. I think people have a tough time talking about computer strength because very few people are competent enough to analyze the games properly with their own minds. Instead they use statistically meaningless short matches and tournaments, analysis made by other programs, and emphasis on class-B mistakes that every program still makes. If someone wants to talk about games from a higher-level perspective, I would be happy to listen, and I bet Bob would be as well. Likewise, if someone wants to learn enough statistics to perform a match and accurately express what the results mean, it would be hard to argue with the result, although if this effort is undertaken as a precursor to telling Bob that he's wasted his life, or something similar to this, it might reflect rather poorly upon the experimenter. bruce
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