Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Positions of known value?

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 16:35:47 07/25/00

Go up one level in this thread


On July 25, 2000 at 19:30:28, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On July 25, 2000 at 19:08:57, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>On July 25, 2000 at 18:57:44, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>[snip]
>>>Throwing away what information? Ideally, chess positions are evaluated to one of
>>>three values. If you have any more information than that, you can be sure it's
>>>flawed.
>>
>>Really?  You only score positions as +/-/0?
>>Then how do you choose one when there are more than a single positive
>>alternative?
>
>I didn't say that I only score positions as +/-/0. That would be ideal, but it's
>just not practical. I use a flawed evaluation function, just like everybody
>else. :)
>
>>
>>>If I aim to duplicate Crafty's evaluation function scores, then I will end up
>>>recreating Crafty's evaluation function. That's not my intention.
>>
>>I think you will find that for a given depth of evaluation, correct evaluation
>>functions generally agree to within a pawn or better.
>>
>>>I would like to be able to tweak one of my evaluation function weights and see
>>>if it helps the function predict the outcome of the game better.
>>
>>If your evaluation function misses the mark by several pawns, it won't help
>>predict the outcome of the game better.
>
>If my evaluation function gave positive scores to winning positions, it would
>win all of its games, period. If the positive scores were random, it would
>probably win in stupid ways, but it would still win.
>
>-Tom

Given that most annotated games use a few standard symbols for assessment (which
I can't reproduce literally here, because the web board doesn't support unicode
:-), but here's an approximation: + -  +-  +=  =  =+  -+  - + ) I think it is
reasonable to take such positions out of a massive game collection and do
regression testing.  There's bound to be a fair bit of noise, but that's
unavoidable in any case, I'd imagine.

Dave



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.