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Subject: Re: I will continue the match until there is a diffence of 7 games

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 17:05:39 12/20/00

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On December 20, 2000 at 19:06:18, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>On December 20, 2000 at 12:17:19, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>I think that 25 out of 32 is more significant than 107 out of 200.
>
>I don't think it is a matter of opinion.
>
>You have two programs, A and B.  They play 32 games.  Each game is either won or
>lost.  If one side doesn't score 25 or more, you repeat.  If one side scores 25
>or more, you stop and call that program stronger.
>
>You do the same thing with 200 games and use 107 as your stop score.
>
>My experiments showed that for many different rating differences, the odds of
>making a mistake was about the same.  For instance, if there is a rating point
>difference of 25 Elo points, in the 200 case the weaker side will score at least
>107 out of 200 about 7% of the time that someone does it, which will lead you to
>a wrong conclusion.  In the 32 case, the weaker side will score 25 about 8% of
>the time that someone does it, likewise leading you to a wrong conclusion.

You are right that if you know before testing that the difference is small then
25-7 is not so convincing about the question which program is better and it
seems to be the case when programmers make an upgrade.

In this case 25-7 for the new version is not convincing but 25-7 for the old
version seems to be more convincing because if you see this kind of result you
can suspect that the new version has a bug.

Practically if I see 25-7 results between different programs I suspect that the
difference is clearly bigger than 200 elo so the results seem very convincing to
me because I do not have an opinion that the difference is small before testing.

Uri



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