Author: Adam Oellermann
Date: 09:22:52 08/01/01
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On August 01, 2001 at 12:20:42, José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba wrote: >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. Good points. I'm still having a little difficulty imagining what kind of chess would be played by a USCF ELO 100 player. - Adam
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