Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 08:07:55 10/23/00
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> GT has larger-than-life king safety scores. That > is all. No different search paradigm or anything else. There are several end-user easily tunable programs. Programmer's have also been tuning their evaluation functions for ages. Had it been just matter of improving strength by increasing king safety scores, most programs would be playing in that style already. To get GT's performance, there must be some additional ingredient that other programmer's have missed. Since Christophe was talking about plans to unify GT with regular Tiger, it has to be some extra work done and spread out (so it can't be trivially transplanted into the regular Tiger) within the lower level search code which helps it discover and judge attacking chances better than other programs. Or perhaps that in combination with some new more elaborate king-attack oriented post-processing evaluator (using the above mentioned info) which affects the evaluations and the search in the next iteration. This would in effect create a feedback loop between the low level search and the knowledge based post-processor, but unlike conventional leaf evaluators, where knowledge is applied at the leaves and flows up the tree toward the root, here it would flow both ways, where the post-processor for the iteration N would act as a pre-processor for the iteration N+1. That would be a much more dynamic and sensitive pre-processor compared to the static pre-processors (which only looks at the features of the root position). In any case, however far or close the above conjectures may be, it would be a difference of at least that size that makes GT play in the risky, attacking style and still perform exceptionally well against other programs. The conventional wisdom is that such style, while effective against humans (such as Rebel's Anti-GM mode), will fail to impress and spook other strong programs. That conventional wisdom wasn't some arbitrary dictum. It was the result of many years (and across many different programs) of precisely the kind of king safety tweaks which you (and Uri) are now offering as an explanation of the GT's unique combination of a risky style with the superior comp-comp performance. It doesn't fit.
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