Author: Don Dailey
Date: 19:12:51 12/10/97
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On December 10, 1997 at 13:48:00, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >On December 09, 1997 at 18:37:37, Don Dailey wrote: > >>I never seriously considered playing my program Cilkchess on the >>internet >>for these very reasons. It's probably a good thing if all you really >>want is to get in some games in and find weaknesses, but I get very >>uncomfortable with ambiguious results. > >This was frustrating to read, given that it was prompted by something >that I wrote. No, this has nothing to do with anything you said. Common sense told me there would probably be more problems than I was prepared to deal with. Sometimes I'm probably too scientific, I like to know exactly what (who) I'm dealing with and like the conditions to be a lot more controlled than what I would expect over the internet against anonymous players of unknown strength. But I concede that there may be some useful lessons to be learned. > >My program has been on the net for three years, and having it there has >helped me a lot. I wish that you'd get yours on the net as well, and >would hope that others would also do this. > >I get a wide variety of opponents. Sometimes you knew exactly who you >are playing, and get a good idea of how you stand against that account. >Other times you don't know what bet you -- it could have been Roman >playing on a ghost accounts, it could have been another computer plus a >passive operator, it could have been a human assisted by a computer, or >it could have been some fish who found a hole in your program. So you >get a wide variety of losses to learn from. I'm not completely opposed to the idea of putting Cilkchess out there. I'm sure there are advantages as you stated (and of course I've experienced these same things too.) > >For about a month before Paris I looked at every game, every day. Since >then I've taken a break, but I have to catch up. I have 1114 games to >look at (at least 260 with IM's or GM's, and a couple hundred with other >computers) , including 196 losses or draws. This will take a while, but >I'm going to look at each of those games, starting with the losses, of >course. I'm sure I will plug some holes in the book, discover some >middlegame mistakes, and get some ideas for more endgame knowledge. > >I think this is very worthwhile, considering that all I had to do to get >this data is connect to the net and wait. > >How do you get games? Do you auto-test? Do you have strong players >that play a lot of games with your program? We do a tremendous amount of self-testing and I do manual testing against strong PC programs. The manual testing is invaluable since it forces me to get involved personally and it prompts the most changes. We want to add auto testing too but do not currently do it. I doubt it will be as useful to me though as the manual (labor intensive) stuff. We have reasonably strong players willing to play Cilkchess and are planning on taking more advantage of this. Right now we do not do enough of this. I agree that it doesn't matter who is playing if you can generate some losses or interesting results to learn from. But we do get plenty of losses from playing strong PC programs. -- Don
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