Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 17:52:54 05/11/00
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Chess programs search to variable depth, and their evaluation function is accurate with variable degree of confidence. Strength is search plus positional understanding of key groups of positions. Sometimes a human will win a game on brute tactics, by seeing more in a tactical position. The odds of this are reduced with better hardware, since when you add hardware you improve the search aspect of strength most. Other times a human will win because the game is driven into a situation where the computer's evaluation is consistently useless or even worse than useless. I call this a "dead space" in the tree. Sometimes the whole tree is dead space. In these cases increased search can't defend a program adequately, so improved hardware doesn't improve these cases significantly. Sometimes it is possible to improve these cases by improving eval, but other times it is very difficult to do anything about them without affecting general-case positions adversely. Effective strength can change dramatically based upon the root position you search from, and not in every case do you get significantly better if you add horsepower. bruce
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