Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba
Date: 09:20:42 08/01/01
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On August 01, 2001 at 04:27:02, Adam Oellermann wrote: [big snip] > >When I got started with my chess program, I wanted to test my move generation >and so I implemented exactly that; a program which would play chess by randomly >picking a move. It played a few games against my wife, who is in the category of >"knows the moves but hardly ever plays"; it never survived a middle game. I >would suspect that even a four-year-old who knows that "it's good to eat the >pieces" would win well over 99% of games, although obviously I don't have much >in the way of stats. > >Some quick calculations in order to make this seem scientific... >- Branching factor is (say) 20 for the first 20 ply. I know, it may be more. >- Nothing reduces branching factor, because there is no eval/search >- Assume that to have a decent position in the middlegame against a novice, you >need to pick one of the top 4 moves in a perfectly-ordered move list. >- after 20 ply, the odds of having a decent position are 0.2^10 (you're only >playing alternate moves), which means the odds are 0.0000001024; or you'll get >one decent middlegame in about 10,000,000. > >After that it gets worse; there are fewer good moves and potentially much more >branching in the middlegame. I therefore can state with some confidence that the >random-mover will never beat the 4-year-old. Implication: 4-year old is at least >750 elo points ahead of the random mover; which means the random-mover is >probably negative Elo (if such a thing is possible). > The four-year-old is going to stalemate the random mover in quite a few games, so I think the Elo difference is smaller. In theory there could be negative ratings, but all the chess organisations I know have an absolute lower limit for a rating, the lowest I have read is 100 (yes, one hundred) for the USCF. José. >Puts me in mind of a big heap of monkeys, a big heap of typewriters, and >Shakespeare. > >Cheers >Adam
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