Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 10:23:23 12/18/00
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On December 17, 2000 at 19:36:04, Fernando Villegas wrote:
>Hi Cristophe:
>Maybe what makes difficult for someone to believe -but I believe it - that
>current crop is around 800 points stronger than old crop is how much "great" the
>figure 800 seems to be, as an absolute quantity, not taking into account that is
> an statistically produced figure. But people forgets thaty in "absolute" terms
>of chess capabilities it is enough that a program be just better to produce
>sistematic wins that, at last, translate in enormous score difference. A simple
>example for unbelievers: if in my teens I had runned several 100 meters races
>with the world champ of that far age, my current absolute difference in speed
>with him was maybe "just" a couple of despicable seconds, but that had been
>enough for me to lose every race. So his "elo" would had been 1000 points or
>more better than mine. I have tested that precisely with sargon III, as you may
>remember, some time ago. I too believed, in that time, that there was not great
>difference. In fact, if you just see how Sargon handle well a lot of things, you
>just think progress has been discrete, but then it if you continue looking what
>happens, you realize that is enough he does not so well in endings or so to lose
>every game with any top current program. And that is equal to maybe that awful
>800 points.
>Fernando
Yes, Sargon III was very poor in the endgame. Those were the days when
programmers were mostly concerned by not losing the middlegame. I think Sargon
does not even know the square of the king rule. Very poor handling of passed
pawns.
On the other hand, even Sargon's middlegame is poor for today's standards. This
is because Sargon III is a brute force program. It looks at every possible
combination of moves, even the most stupid ones, just in case. Modern programs
know how to "prune out" obviously losing lines, and therefore can compute much
deeper than Sargon with the same computational effort. That makes a really big
difference.
Even Sargon's opening book is a joke for current top programs.
Christophe
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