Author: Graham Laight
Date: 02:00:34 05/12/00
Go up one level in this thread
On May 11, 2000 at 20:52:54, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>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
Hi Bruce,
A picture paints a thousand words, so let me try to paraphrase you
diagramatically:
What you seem to be saying is that a chess programs' knowledge (or positional
understanding) + search extensions may give it a knowledge profile as
illustrated below:
ply |-------------------------------------------------------------|
| $$$$$ # |
25 | # # |
| # ## # |
20 | ## ## # # # |
| ## ### # ## # |
15 | ## # ### #### ### ### ## |
| ######## # ############## ######### ###### ### |
10 |#############################################################|
|#############################################################|
5 |#############################################################|
|#############################################################|
|-------------------------------------------------------------|
Breadth of knowledge
However, if the significant knowledge required is in this instance is where the
"$" symbols on the diagram are, then all the hard work the computer is doing is
effectively going to waste.
-g
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