Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 14:25:25 07/26/01
Go up one level in this thread
On July 26, 2001 at 06:28:17, Iddo Bentov wrote: >hello.. >your post is very interesting.... thanks very much for your reply.. > >your first ideas is simple and interesting.. exactly the kind we >were looking for.. we'll look into it.. if there is an article by >Don Beal we could look up.. it could help.. i tried www search but >nothing much came up.. i wonder how important minimizing the number >of rules is.. and wonder what percent of correctness we should >expect from such a function.. e.g. for KP vs K and KR vs KN The article is in "Advances in Computer Chess 2", edited by M.R.B. Clarke, published in 1980 by Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 0 85224 377 4, and you should probably get full credit if you can just *find* the book. Don Beal himself should be more findable. He's a professor at Queen Mary and William College somewhere in England. If you can't find his address, please ask here and someone can probably find it. Beal's function is supposedly correct. I don't know how he tested it. It's not particularly big. If you make *any* progress with any other endgame database that isn't trivially won you have probably done something worth doing. This doesn't sound terribly hard. If you aren't a macho guy in need of a big challenge you may wish to do this one. >about wild7 (i play it on icc) and in general.. what sort of methods >can be used to solve a position whose minimax tree (with alpha-beta >and using hashtable etc) is still intractable..? it seems that for >wild7 patterns recognition could help? but in general.. are there >any interesting methods to solve positions? I think that Berliner used an endgame database, but since there are 8 pieces on the board, and that's too many to solve using a conventional endgame database, there must have been a trick. I don't know what the trick was. I think Berliner is still around, too, and if he can't deal with you it's possible that someone else at CMU can. >btw it seems that computer programs aren't good at wild7? at least >on my old p133 cpu.. is it because of null-moves ? i notice that >crafty on icc accepts many wild types.. but not wild7 Computers are bad at wild 7, and it's not because of null-move, which most computer would have turned off in K+P endings. My guess is that it's just hard to figure it out from the root. Simply a history of wild 7 would be interesting. The ending is discussed in Averbakh's "Pawn Endings". My copy doesn't have an ISBN and it's stamped "EXPORT OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PHILIPPINES PUNISHABLE BY LAW". Good luck finding your own copy. Averbakh states that "the correct evaluation of [this ending] was first given by Szen and analysis by Walker (in 1840)". So you could be having some library fun, if you want to. Some people think that this is the point of college, so if your professor is one of those people, there you go. This sounds like a pretty hard project. >also i'm interested to know, are there any chess positions that have >a known solution proved by humans, but none of the computer programs >can solve no matter how long they think? i think that in checkers >there is known opening (white doctor) where all computer programs >make the wrong move.. i wonder if it is always possible to create >a position that will trick all chess programs.. if such positions >exist in chess.. then i wonder what are such positions with the least >amount of pieces? It can't be possible to make a position that will trick all chess programs, since a program that plays perfect chess is theoretically possible. There are lots of positions that are correct and yet hard for computers, but if you try to make something that solves these better than current programs, that is extremely ambitious and you'll probably end up begging for mercy from your professor. bruce >any comments would be appreciated.... >thanks again....
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.