Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 10:13:34 03/18/98
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On March 18, 1998 at 05:41:06, Ed Schröder wrote: >This is no joke. I checked the Rebel9 book learn software and I can >do it if I wish. This is crazy no? It's crazy because the 30-40 elo >improvement is counted as a gain of playing strength. That's what >the list implies or? > >And now the $64,000 question.... > >Shall I? > >It's a cheat no? > >It's a cheat because it hides the REAL strength of an chess engine. Make a great learner. I'll never accuse you of cheating. You can promote it as the newest greatest feature in Rebel 10 and you won't hear a peep from me. Learners are great. It's an area of computer chess that has been neglected but now has been brought back into play because of you guys competing with each other (trying to dick each other) on the Swedish list, and to a much lesser extent because of the success of Crafty's learner on ICC. A learner is as honest and useful as null-move search or what the germans call "permanent brain". If you don't have a learner, your domain is the single game. Chess programmers have been competing in repeated instances of single games for years and years. But this has always been a flaw in the computer approach. This "REAL" strength you speak of is incomplete and sadly limited. Innovation that goes beyond this is not cheating. The human approach is to try to improve your play, or at least avoid playing the same losing line N times in a row. It is an *advance* in the state of computer play when computers do the same thing. With a learner, your domain is the match. You no longer have this utterly unrealistic spell of amnesia after every game, you can adapt to what your opponents hit you with. Add a learner that can handle with interrupted matches. Furthermore, feel free to enhance it so it understands the traits of more than one opponent (not necessarily so that it knows that it is playing "Genius", but rather that it is playing "Bob" instead of "Fred"). This allows a program to go beyond the match domain, and enter the career domain. A related issue involves how the Swedish list people do testing. Perhaps the conditions under which these programs compete need to be more fully specified. If there is a single entry for this wonderful new learning (if I convince you) "Rebel 10", there should be a single entity called "Rebel 10", and that entity should be able to benefit from experience gained by every game this entity plays. I don't know if it would be practical to do this, but the Swedish list folks need to take extra pains to run these matches fairly when there are programs that are operating within the domain of the match or career instead of the single game. And perhaps the programmers need to be involved by helping to specify the conditions under which their programs compete, and possibly by creating utilities that make the Swedish testers' jobs easier (for instance, by creating something that allows you to export your learning information, so one tester can email it to another tester who wants to run a match with your program). bruce
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