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Subject: Re: why not

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 11:55:17 08/09/00

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On August 09, 2000 at 12:47:01, walter irvin wrote:

>why is not more time spent on better learning for programs????

Because nobody has figured out an ideal way to do it yet.  Your program finds a
good move at 40/2 and salts it away.  Two years later, when your hardware is 4x
faster, that good move is now a poor move, because the computer may easily find
a better one.

>while there is a
>vast number of legal positions ,the number of positions that a strong program
>will encounter is much smaller .

I have a little over 100 million positions in my game database.  I suspect if I
were able to download all the chess games from FICS and ICC it would double or
triple that.  At 12 minutes per position it represents a significant investment
in time to analyze them all.  Not saying that is a bad idea, but you'd have to
be off your rocker to try it.
;-)

>plus just not playing a position when there is a
>negative score on that position doesn't really work because :sometimes the bad
>move is 5 or 6 moves back, but takes that many moves to be realized .sometimes
>the losing move is not easily know .the only way to go is to record winning
>positions and delete losing ones

Define winning position.  If I lose sometime sometime after playing 1. e4 has 1.
e4 now become a losing position?

>.that way all you are ever left with are the
>winning positions that can stand the test of time .why is this not done .instead
>a programmer will spend hours trying to fine tune a evaluation that may play
>better in some position and woarse in others , at least it plays different
>????????

Because while learning is a good idea, it is probably not a great idea.  What
programs would have learned 10 years ago would be almost completely valueless
today.  Take a 64 CPU alpha machine and install a SMP crafty on it, and the
learning done on a single CPU machine suddenly has become laughable.

If there were easy and workable solutions to problems like this, programmers
would implement them.  There aren't any.

Learning (in general) is a pretty good idea and most advanced programs do some
learning.  But it's not the panacea you think it is.

Just a minor suggestion:
Judicious use of the shift key, space-bar, and punctuation marks might make your
posts a bit more readable.
IMO-YMMV



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