Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 16:38:59 11/08/00
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On November 08, 2000 at 17:47:43, Joe Besogn wrote: >I try you on Kuhn's requirements, and will answer a response tomorrow, since it >is late here: > >normal-science before null move you describe as what? I will take you at face value and attempt to answer these questions. Please bear in mind that I haven't read the book so my answers might not conform to the book's religious perspective. If you wave the book at me I'm not going to be able to respond properly. Before the null-move, there was no null move. If you read anything written about computer chess before the Donninger article, you won't find an enthusiastic article about it. Campbell wrote one where he left out a crucial point -- that it made your program a whole lot better to do it -- while talking at some length about how it could mess up. Bob supposedly did it, but that's not published, I think. Fritz did it, and that's not published of course. Some of the other commercials do it or god knows what, but it's not like they talk about it. The amateurs were in a slightly different world. The reason the Donninger article worked is that he include a little table that showed search results for one position, and he found a crucial move radically faster. >what exemplars from normal science time became anomolies? Were they important? I don't know what this means, since you are using terms-of-religion. If you mean, who didn't use it, an obvious answer is Deep Thought, which to my knowledge did not use it. They mistrusted it, and I recall hearing that it didn't work alongside singular extension. Their downplay of null-move is one reason people wonder if Deep Thought and Deep Blue were really any good. Talk about being "safe" is the kind of talk you hear from someone who has written a micro program that does sixr plies in the middlegame. If you told me I would get to use my quad Xeon box against someone running on a 286, I wouldn't remove null-move in order to search the same number of plies as they do, but more "safely". No way. I'd leave it on full blast and drop bricks on them from great height. >what was the crisis in normal-science? Another term of religion, I think. The crisis is that the amateurs got beaten by the professionals. >what anomoly was then solved by the null-move technology? We kicked ass. >how were chess revolutionarily programs different afterwards? Richard Lang had to deal with being beaten by people he'd never heard of. Maybe these people had invented this stuff or stuff like it previous to us, but once that Donninger article came out, the genie was out of the bottle. >did anyone resist the null-move? politically? Some people mistrusted it. Ask Bob if he likes it and he'll say no. I love it, it's free speed, and there seems to be little if any downside, regardless of what kind of program you are trying to write. >can you say that null-move was more than just "puzzling" (kuhn's phrase) within >the normal-science? What? Someone promoted an idea that got you 1-2 extra plies for free, with the minor drawback that every once in a while you'd make a mistake. As far as I can tell everyone jumped at it. Talk to people about it, there are a lot of people who read that article. It was given some sort of prize as the best article by a new author, and I completely agree. >Personally, I think it was great idea that required a real leap of thought, so >I'm open to the idea .... > >I ask because there are of course developments evolutionarily. Kuhn claims these >as puzzling in normal-science. The revolutionary changes, he says, take place as >a result of crisis in normal-science. Presumably Kuhn sees paradigm shifts as >being at the top end of grey scale of change, where the scale is gradual, but >with a catastrophic over-the-edge-flip in some central region. I think it depends upon how you graduate your change scale. There can be a change forced by new hardware, such that we have to throw away all our code and write a new kind of code for something that isn't a Von Neumann machine. You can have changes that force us to throw away alpha-beta search and eval functions and all that. Or we can talk about one small improvement to alpha-beta that everyone embraces and results in a quantum improvement. >The other quick thought, is that Kuhn talks of pre-science, where developers are >working independently, without too much communication. The first paradigm arises >from this. Some of the items you describe sound like this pre-science period. I don't know what this means. bruce >>Other programs have had success with techniques that weren't thought to be >>useful, for instance self-teaching. This hasn't started a wave of self-learning >>programs yet, but there have been some interesting articles and some interesting >>attempts. >> >>We will probably see more interest in speculative evaluation since Christophe's >>speculative program has been a success. >> >>All the programs that I know of now are built on a brute-force framework, with >>selective extension and selective pruning. If anyone can make a strong program >>that doesn't use these mechanisms, that will cause the most major shift we've >>seen so far. >> >>bruce
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