Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 17:01:49 05/21/01
Go up one level in this thread
On May 21, 2001 at 18:33:32, Ratko V Tomic wrote:
>> I flip a coin 5 times and it comes up heads every time.
>> Does that mean the coin is biased?
>
>It is not as simple as a coin toss. If all you extract out
>of 100+ plies played in a game is the result (one of values
>1,0.5,0), then you're wasting 99.9.. percent of available
>information. You can play a single game against, say, a GM
>and you will know a few moves after the opening that you're
>dealing with a player much stronger than you. Or, playing
>against a complete novice, you can again easily guess that
>his/her rating is much lower than yours, even though not
>a single game has been finished, and according to your
>chess==coin_tossing theory, there is zero information
>available.
>
>We have also all seen quite accurate ratings of programs
>extracted after only few dozen next-move evaluations (e.g.
>with well calibrated test suites). A single game has often
>several times more positions that program has evaluated,
>therefore the information is there even after a single
>game to get the prgram's rating within a 50-100 points.
>
>The only model in which your coin tossing theory of chess
>is meaningful is a mindless rating estimator taking in
>only 1.58 bits of information per game (log2(3)), i.e.
>the final game outcome and nothing else. Looking
>through that kind of tiny pinhole anything you look at
>will look random and senseless.
Actually, everything is a coin toss {probability function}, including such
mudane things as:
"Will I hit the 'post' button?"
"How tall am I?"
"When I flip the light switch will it come on?"
In fact, we often have an interesting mix of outcomes:
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/ardlouis/dissipative/Schrcat.html
until the measurement occurs.
Albert Einstein was almost always right. But he was wrong about this:
"God does not throw dice."
Other links of interest:
http://www.dnv.com/ocean/nbt/Stics/zFrame.htm
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~qbayes/Tutorial/
http://www.cis.hut.fi/harri/thesis/valpola_thesis/node12.html
http://cochlea.hut.fi/harri/thesis/bayesformulas.html
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