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Subject: Re: ECM98 Draft 2

Author: John Stanback

Date: 13:52:02 04/30/98

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On April 30, 1998 at 12:59:08, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>
>On April 30, 1998 at 07:57:44, Howard Exner wrote:
>
>>What time do the programmers want to use for deleting the
>>easy ones? 10, 20, or 30 seconds (assuming like hardware)?
>
>Be very careful when you do this, and think about what you are doing.
>
>Here is what happened to me.
>
>I made a "hard" set out of ECM, I kept everything that wasn't solved in
>under X seconds, although I don't remember what X was.
>
>Now, of course, what I have just done is created a test suite that my
>program will perform worst on if it is run for under X seconds.  I will
>score zero on this suite, even a program that chooses randomly between
>candidate moves will score more than this.
>
>And if the suite is run for longer than X seconds, other programs will
>find some of the answers in less than X seconds, while mine won't find
>any in that time.  All of the problems that are easy for me and hard for
>others have been deleted, leaving problems that might be easy for
>others.
>
>So whatever programs you use to determine "easiness" are going to score
>in last place when you run the suite for real.
>
>bruce

I agree that this could become a problem.  Also, I think that it
is useful have some "easy" positions for use with slow machines or
very fast testing, or for authors of new programs to use in judging
progress.  I'm in favor of either keeping all the positions or only
tossing those solved in 1 second or less by the majority of the
commercial programs.

John



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