Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: A New Self-Play Experiment -- Diminishing Returns Shown with 95% Conf.

Author: Andrew Dados

Date: 11:41:32 05/25/00

Go up one level in this thread


On May 25, 2000 at 12:42:22, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>On May 24, 2000 at 18:00:12, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>The idea is ok, but I don't like the concept of playing program X vs itself
>>with different depths.  Your conclusion can easily be right for Fritz, but
>>wrong for other programs...  It would be hard to draw conclusions based on
>>testing only one program that is known to be very fast but not very 'smart'.
>
>It is better than nothing.  Up until now, we didn't really have any good data
>for any program.  It is interesting to know that Elo increase doesn't *have* to
>be linear due to some natural law or something.
>
>bruce

For program with unknown source there is always some 'doubt'.

Lets assume its eval produces a very limited set of scores (which is true for
root processors, but also for programs with full, but simple eval). Now: the
smaller set of scores, the smaller chance of getting new best move based on
positional factors. Also some dirty pruning/speeding techniques, like shifting
score up at root to blur out small score differences, or assigning a value to
null move (shifting alpha) will produce nice speedup, but at the cost of reduced
'positional granularity'.

What we can say after Ernsts experiment is: "Some unknown factors can produce
diminishing returns". Not much, imo.
-Andrew-



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.