Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 15:03:28 08/18/00
There has been some discussion about the use of test suites and their usefulness for program improvements. Personally, I plan to use them extensively to fiddle with "bean-counter" in order to try to get things right. Since there are so many variations that are possible with hundreds of parameters, I was planning to use gradient search error minimizations with the evaluation function to try and find an optimal value for all the parameters that solves a test set of perhaps 5000 carefully verified positions. (Iteration would be so expensive it would be impossible to use it). The experiment would be repeated at different time controls, as perhaps some parameters are also a function of time! Now, I am wondering (since at least one of the world's best chess programmers does not use them at all) if it is such a good idea. So, I am wondering, if you do not use test positions to tune your evaluation parameters, how on earth do you choose suitable values for each positional, tactical, and material parameter? What are the alternatives? Why are the alternatives better? If test positions were used in the past and abandoned, what prompted the change of heart? If test positions have *never* been tried, how is it known that they won't be useful?
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