Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 23:57:09 09/13/00
Go up one level in this thread
On September 14, 2000 at 02:17:58, Ed Schröder wrote: [snip] >IMO every game played in WCCC events is worth at least 10 autoplayer >games. Authors are present to solve any problem that might occur, no >book randomness, no learning involved, book preparation should ensure >that the author's program should play those lines the program likes >best. Barring some errant codes sent by Winboard [as is alledged for some autoplayers], I disagree completely. The books used are those created by the authors. The learning that goes on is the exact same learning that would go on in normal play. If your program does not learn and the other does, then their program's edge is one that they have earned. Special books cooked for a tournament show the ability of the book preparation people and not the ability of the engines. After a while, killer likes will be debugged by learners and won't get played anymore by the opposition. >The WCCC is playing games under the most optimal conditions for chess >programs. > >Autoplayer tournaments are a whole different world. > >Both are valuable but IMO are not comparable. Unless bugs are present in the automatic tournament managers, the data is just as good as any hand run tournaments. Actually, since the errors introduced by innacuracies of non-automatic move entry will cause the experiment to be hard to reproduce, if anything such modes of play are inferior, from an experimental standpoint. If this element of randomness is needed to prevent similar losing lines from being played repeatedly, then (again) it is a program flaw. I have seen no convincing arguments that autoplayer games are inferior except that invalid command sequences are possibly generated by some autoplayers. I know of no complaints against Winboard in this regard. Furthermore, for Winboard programs (which is what I am testing) they are nearly always going to be played using a Winboard interface. If played on the net using an automatic mode (as most seem to do) the results will much more closely mirror what will be achieved in practice.
This page took 0.01 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.