Author: Ricardo Gibert
Date: 15:22:53 09/14/00
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On September 14, 2000 at 17:19:37, Dann Corbit wrote: >On September 14, 2000 at 17:16:33, Ricardo Gibert wrote: >[snip] >>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. > >Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. > >>In a chess game, it is illogical and pointless to >>expend extra effort to find them. > >And yet all commercial chess programs seem to continue the search if I ask them >to. Did they get it wrong? You're failing to give an important issue suffient weght. An important issue is what constitutes a success. In the example given, 1.Nf6 fills the bill more than adquately. The move 1.Nf6 constitutes a successful solution IMO. Finding the fastest mate is a significantly different problem. It is a specialty of interest to problemists, but not to a practical player. A program like Chest is better at finding mates, but nobody _should_ suppose that capability makes for a stronger program. I can just picture someone tweaking their program so that it can score "better" on these type of positions and thereby unwittingly making their program weaker, hence the motive for my post. As far as how hard it is to search 16 plies, I don't think the example you give is a good one. I can see how a program might prune away from its search a line leading to mate, because it has already found a line that is quite strong. In a sense, it is getting "misled" by the presence of a perfectly strong move. It would be better to use an example where there is only one continuation that leads to a win rather than several. I don't want a program to waste its time looking for a "better" winning line. Particularly when the "better" winning line is likely to not be the main continuation. I think this is the case most of the time in a programs search.
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