Author: Uri Blass
Date: 12:18:54 12/28/00
How much rating can programs earn by playing against themselves? I think that it is possible to improve the rating of programs by playing a lot of games between the program and itself when you change one parameter(for example increasing the value of pawn by 5%). It is possible to play a lot of games and stop only when there is a difference of 70 in order to learn if increasing the value of pawn by 5% is a good change or a bad change(we need big difference because the difference from small change is usually small and we can get often wrong results if we stop only at small difference). If you find that increasing the value of pawn by 5% is productive you do the change and the program learned to increase the value of pawn. After it you continue in doing similiar tests. I think that programmers need a lot of beta testers in order to do all these tests and the question is what is the size of the improvement that you can get by these tests. I know that people can claim that you can improve the program in playing against itself when you do not improve it against other programs but I believe that most of the improvement is an improvement against other programs (at least in cases when the decision of the programmer is to do symmetric evaluation). The interesting question is how much improvement programmers can get by this way if they have enough money to pay for beta testers so they can get enough games. Other interesting questions are if there are examples when the same evaluation change is productive in 1 minute per game and counter productive in longer time control and if there are examples when A beats B, B beats C but C beats A(I mean when all the results are significant results). Uri
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