Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 17:53:24 11/11/00
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On November 11, 2000 at 03:26:41, Tanya Dchenka wrote: >The strength of a chess program is more influenced on by how the opening book is >made. If you make the strongest opening book yourself then you have made the >strongest program. The difference in strength between the engines influences the >game less than when the game is forced into a hopeless position by a bad opening >book. What you say necessarily must have a certain element of truth in it, since much effort is put into development of opening books. If books made no difference at all, then nobody would spend a lot of time on developing the books. That argues in favor of comparing computers by giving each of them a set of positions to start from. If a new set of positions were to be automatically created and provided only seconds before the computer comparisons were to begin, then the programmers would not be able to prepare lines to use against them. But that "solution" would only replace one set of evils with another set. There would probably be no end to the arguments as to how the positions should be generated. And once the method of generation were known to the engine programmers, they might be able to use that information to optimize their engines for play against the types of positions that they would expect. Nevertheless, comparison of computers by use of test positions is widely used. But the big highly publicized competitions are not that way, to the best of my knowledge.
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