Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 02:03:14 05/22/01
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> If you tune your TV to an unused channel and watch the > static, your brain will create meaning. You are not trying to hint that the spiritual masters from Sirius are not really sending the encoded messages in the TV screen noise? :) Actually, your brain will create a meaning out of some noisy electric signals caused by photons striking your retina. You may think of it as the "real-world," but it is just some private little toy model made up by your brain as it correlates all those seemingly chaotic electric pulses (i.e. any meaning is a "created meaning"). > Since they are designed to produce a specific result, it's > hard for me to understand why people praise any suite's > predictive powers. They do produce ratings within hours, which may take months for SSDF/ELO method. So, they're a perfectly valid model for predicting SSDF list (whether that is important is another matter). The nontrivial/significant aspect of the suites is that there _exist at all_ so microscopically small sub-sets of all the chess positions which can statistically predict program's performance in real games. That is, the suites extract much more information from tiny samples of positions, far beyond what a coin tossing model (the SSDF method) would from similar size samples of positions. After a few dozen positions in a single game, the coin tossing model (regular ELO) predicts almost nothing about the future performance of a program, while a good suite will produce predictions (after its few dozens evaluations) which the coin tossing model will take 3+ orders of magnitude more positions to match for accuracy. > It's like a magician who puts a bunch of colored balls in a > bunch of colored boxes, then covers his eyes and tells you > which color box has which color ball inside it. > Of course he'd know which box contains which ball. > He's the one who put them in boxes. You could argue the same way against any physics experiment which produces predicted results. Indeed, the physicst arranges the experimental set-up just right to make it follow the desired behavior. The essential aspect is that in order to actually "fix" such "rigged" arrangement, the physicist uses theoretical models which are much more economical to run through than the real thing (the actual reality run on the full set-up). That is the point of the models, like the toy aircraft one runs in the wind tunnel or on a computer simulator -- they're much cheaper and less risky to run than the full scale reality run. And for the magician, yes, he needs the economical and effective models of human perception and resoning loopholes to rig his set-up, too. The same goes for the test suites or a careful analysis of a single/few games and the program evaluation outputs. Without relying on such economy of efforts, the models (or seeing patterns in apparent randomness), one could never improve a chess program (e.g. if one had to wait months for thousands of games, where only the final outcome, i.e. 1.58 bits/game is extracted, in order to find out whether any given change strenghtens the program).
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