Author: Ed Schröder
Date: 11:44:50 03/17/98
Go up one level in this thread
>Posted by Bruce Moreland on March 17, 1998 at 13:35:19: >>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. Human - Computer story, I 101% agree. >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*. Comp - Comp I disagree. I prefer to see clean engine-engine fights instead of learner-learner fights. Since this seems to be the new fashion I like to pass. - Ed - >bruce
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.