Author: Kevin Stafford
Date: 14:37:02 07/26/01
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>An engine that is twice as fast will find tactical shots in half the time. This >is a *good* thing. > >But high NPS doesn't necessarily imply tactical speed, nor do low NPS >necessarily imply more positional knowledge. > >If a program does expensive stuff in order to try to improve move ordering, >nodes per second will decrease but the program will search faster. This has >nothing to do with positional knowledge. > >Also, it's possible to add "knowledge" to an eval function that behaves like >search. Here is an example: > >1) Program X searches 10 plies at a very high node rate, but doesn't see two-ply >tactics in its eval function. > >2) Program Y searches 8 plies and can see two-ply tactics in its eval function. >Its node rate is much lower because it is looking for two-ply tactics. > >Program Y is not smarter, it's just increasing its effective depth through eval. > Sometimes it's possible to increase effective depth by a whole lot, and >sometimes you can search 20 plies and have no effective depth, but a low >node-rate program does not necessarily get more effective depth just because it >runs at a low node rate. > >bruce The argument isn't really about node-rate in this case, but I can see the confusion as that is the topic of the thread. I was coming back to an earlier argument made by Otello that positional knowledge is effectively useless in chess, because chess is all tactics. My point was that even the fastest engines today (measured however you wish, depth, NPS, etc) have a good amount of positional knowledge, and that positional considerations are hardly made obsolete by gaining the ply or two over the competition you'll get by using a quick (but less-intelligent) eval function. I hope that makes some sense. -Kevin
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