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Subject: Re: Validity of self-play testing

Author: Andrew Williams

Date: 00:52:22 05/23/00

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On May 22, 2000 at 03:22:37, Peter McKenzie wrote:

>Recently I've noticed that my program tends to overvalue pawns, so I've been
>playing with reducing the pawn value.  How does one test such a change?  Not
>easily thats for sure!
>
>One thing I did was play 150 games vs the old version (new version scored 56% -
>yay), but I'm a little suspicious about how useful this information is.  For
>starters the time control was fast (2min + 2sec inc, on P133), although does
>this really matter for this type of change?
>
>I guess I'll probably just go with the new version and keep an eye on its play
>on ICC...
>
>cheers,
>Peter

Hi Peter,

I used to use Nunn matches between the old and new versions to do this. But I
tended to find that twenty very short games wasn't enough to say anything
useful. So I incorporated a third program (gnuchess, I think) so I'd have a
3-way Nunn Tournament. I stopped doing that in favour of test sets, but I'm
reasonably sure that playing these tournaments was just as useful.

Andrew



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