Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 15:11:41 10/18/00
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>You miss the point. We _know_ it will sacrifice material. In positions >where it is not clear that it wins. IE the Rc6 move. Well, you had put the same essential objection in several different ways (and not only in this thread), and I had picked above the instance with the most objectionable expression of your core issue with GT (which was not the form you expressed above). What it comes down to is that you don't believe anyone can come up with a sufficiently reliable evaluation/prediction of that type, at least not nearly as reliable as the "piece value." So your advice is, one should stick with small adjustment style of positional evaluations (which also have the advantage of keeping all such adjustments in the range of small perturbations, thus making them mathematically nice, additive components). We are not dealing here with a formal system where one could prove to you one way or the other by offering a chain of logical deductions from a commonly accepted premises to the conclusions. The best one can do a priori is present a collection of plausibility arguments and analogies. And what is plausible to me is obviously not plausible to you. The only real proof is in the performance. And on that count GT seems to be well on the way (lets see, among others, how it does in Dutch Open) to proving its view. Another factor to take into account is that its current impressive performance, the scores and the beta testers' judgments/impressions, is achieved by a largely untuned (at least in its key novelty areas) new engine. Either Christophe was very lucky to strike the right tuning values in the first few shots (so it won't improve noticably in version 2), or he did come up with something really new, an entirely new evaluation technique perhaps, which will boost the state of the art by at least couple hundred points, while making games much more enjoyable to humans, by the time it gets fully refined and extended to the other aspects of the play (besides king attacks). In any case, it is unfair to classify it at this stage as just another gimmick, some kind of cheap king safety evaluation tuning effect that many have toyed with and failed with. I think it is already doing much better than what such cheap "novelties" would have shown. Reading between the lines of Christophe's posts here during the last year, I do see hints of a crystallization process of a new technique (which ended up as GT), something which grew out of, or was inspired by, some kind of cross between Lang's and Kittinger's ideas (at least as he glimpsed at them through the reverse engineering of their programs). Since Cristophe probably won't say openly here what exactly he did in GT, check his posts since mid-1999 which mention Lang, Mephisto, Kittinger, Constelation, and I think you will see (as I do) something new was cooking there.
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