Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 10:35:19 03/17/98
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On March 17, 1998 at 12:08:00, Ed Schröder wrote: >Blame me for my part in it. With Rebel9 I joined the club. Now I >step out. It was a mistake. I will not support this silly cooking >race any longer. Back to the roots which is the chess engine. If your program played on ICC you would get a different perspective on the same issue. I had a special version of my program, running on a seperate account, that would play 5-minute blitz chess at maybe 0.2 seconds per move, so it was moving more or less instantaneously. This account was fun for humans to play against, it was pretty strong, they didn't have to sit around waiting for it to make its move, and they could beat it sometimes. The games were always over very quickly, so someone could play dozens of games in a row. I often watched this account zoom up into the 2400-2500 rating region on ICC. But then I would go to sleep, and when I checked on it the next morning it would be at 2100-2200, maybe lower. When I checked my mail it would take forever to download, because there would be like 200 games in the mail. Eventually I would discover that someone had found a way to win, then repeated it a whole bunch of times, gaining points each time. Initially I got mad and refused to play these people anymore. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was wrong to be mad. The fault was mine, not my opponent's. My opponent was just making use of their own highly developed adaptive facilities. The opponent would get beat repeatedly, then learn something and beat my program, and since my program didn't learn anything, it would lose. This is a constant problem for any computer on ICC, and it is bad for everyone. The program gets a low rating. The opponent gets a high rating that doesn't translate against other humans and against other machines that are more adaptive. And the opponent either stops playing against you, or becomes unwilling to innovate, since they know that if they deviate from known lines, they will lose games. It is extremely important to pick the right person to blame for this problem. The blame lies not with the opponent, the blame lies with the computer. The best, most practical solution is to add the best learning you can. It's an honest thing to do, it benefits you, it benefits your opponents (they get to play chess rather than do experiments on a static opponent), it benefits the rest of the people in the rating pool, it's more human-like, etc. You can't isolate the engine anymore. It used to be that you could, since all of the other programmers thought the same way. But now they are trying to build more complete chess players, so you have to build one too. Perhaps their main motivation is to inflate their SSDF results, but it must be realized that regardless of why the learners were added, they do result in a better *chess player*. bruce
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