Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: The 16 ply challenge restated

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 14:16:33 09/14/00

Go up one level in this thread


On September 14, 2000 at 16:43:24, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On September 14, 2000 at 16:31:12, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On September 14, 2000 at 15:55:55, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>Here are a set of tough positions to search deeply.  Just finding a mate is not
>>>good enough, uless you can *prove* it is the shortest mate.
>>
>>Finding a mate is good enough even if you cannot prove that it is the shortest
>>mate.
>
>It's good enough to win.  It's not good enough to find the most beautiful
>solution.  In this case, it is a matter of goals.  You can simply ignore any
>where you find checkmates if you don't like that part of the challenge.

There is nothing particularly beautiful about a flashy mate when something
simpler is available. In fact, many top players regard the flashy mate as a
mistake for practical reasons. In a chess game, it is illogical and pointless to
expend extra effort to find them.

>
>>Doing mistakes of not finding the shortest mate is going to change nothing in
>>rating points so I do not see the importance of it for normal chess programs
>>that are not mate solvers.
>
>Only a few of these will be a sure mate in 16 plies.  Ignore those, if you so
>choose.
>
>>I do not see the point of searching to 16 plies.
>
>Stop at two plies then.  Deeper is better.
>
>>It is easy to search faster if you do more pruning.
>
>But more error prone.  If you search 20 plies by pruning but lose in 5 moves
>because of something you pruned out, it's not such a great idea.  But if you can
>search 20 plies by extensive pruning and always get the same answers as a brute
>force search, then you have found something spectacular.  Alpha-Beta (in
>particular) gets the same answer as exhaustive search, and only requres sqrt(n)
>tests provided you order the moves correctly.



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.