Author: Dan Newman
Date: 14:38:16 06/12/00
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On June 12, 2000 at 17:02:27, Mogens Larsen wrote: >On June 12, 2000 at 15:13:01, Andrew Dados wrote: > >> It takes weeks of analysis to find some cool and sound novelty in opening. >>After you play it - everybody picks it up (especially if you are some >>acknowledged player, or publish it in Informant). How do you expect a comp to >>find those things OTB? Lines some 10-15 moves long, like in Cohrane or Vienna or >>Botvinnik slav or Qxb2 Najdorf or you_name_it... > >So by your opinion it's uninteresting if chess programs are capable of >creating/calculating a sound opening move? If you consider ordinary analysis, >that would probably be true. But why not see if it's possible? It might not be >certain that the current opening theory is carved in stone. In fact a program >could be capable of adding to current theory, but with bigger and bigger books >that's not possible. > >Best wishes... >Mogens What you're talking about is something that I think any of us chess programmers would like to do, but is a problem that's a lot more complex to solve than it may seem to you. What you seem to be asking for is a program that could (effectively) generate opening theory (nearly as good as or perhaps exceeding current opening theory), on-the-fly, during a game. This is asking for a program to do a lot more than a human being can do (even Kasparov) in a realm in which humans are (inherently) much better than computers... Opening theory has evolved over decades, even centuries, with thousands of human minds working on it, analyzing in a fashion that we've been unable to reproduce in a computer as of yet. I think that it's likely that such a program (if we are smart enough to be able to write one) could also be given similar abilities in the middle and endgames and would likely be completely un-beatable by a human. Besides, if there were a rule created that computers can't make reference to an opening book file on disk, programmers can simply put their opening books into the source code as a table of data. There are many tables of data that chess programs make reference to and this would just be another one (albeit a large one)... The way I see it, when a chess program consults its opening book it's sort of analogous to a human relying on his long term memory of opening lines that he's studied (admittedly not a perfect analogy--but then computer chess players aren't pure analogs of human chess players in any other way either). -Dan.
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