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Subject: Re: Validity of self-play testing

Author: Simon Waters

Date: 16:32:13 05/25/00

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On May 22, 2000 at 19:55:54, Peter McKenzie wrote:
>In any case, the main point of my post was related to how such tuning (whether
>it be related to material or positional weightings) can be accurately tested.
>So far nobody has commented anything about the validity or not of selfplay
>testing!

Hmm - well I tried a similar thing with simpler games and genetic type
approaches.

Here we needed some weighting to optimise play at a game - so I created a scheme
to modify the weightings of winning programs to create new programs, and made
them self play.

The new generations would learn to beat the old ones, their off spring would
beat them, and so on - however after a few generations it was clear the
strategies were going in circles, like a never ending games of paper, scissors,
stone.

The lesson here is that most of evolution is not a struggle upwards - but
running to stay where we are in the food change - that sounds like life to me.

However whether this is applicable to your situation depends on what you are
trying to tune, and how that feeds back. If it is just one value - like material
value of a pawn - then I would expect it to be reasonably effective.

Since many are hand tuned, and systemmatic approach to tuning will probably
yield some gains - but don't expect large changes. Remember to pick a constant
unit to base tuning around - most people use the material value of the pawn 8-)

Gnuchess seems to use a test suite - followed by some bouts on the ICS.

There are some classic papers on this kind of tuning problem and lots of
research.



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