Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba
Date: 10:02:49 08/25/01
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On August 25, 2001 at 01:38:23, Mig Greengard wrote: >On August 25, 2001 at 00:04:53, K. Burcham wrote: >> >>i cannot imagine how stefan felt watching this game. shredders score >> quickly went up 5 points, and maintained a five point advantage for quite >> some time. stefan had to feel very confident. somewhere about move 60 >> stefan probably witnessed his score drop tremendously. there must have >> been a lot of surprised chess enthusiasts in the game room. > >I talked about this during this game and a few others I commented live at >KasparovChess.com. I enjoy comparing how computers play and solve problems >compared to how a strong human would go about it. Shredder had an undeniable >advantage for most of the game, and a clearly winning advantage after it won the >exchange. It then started doing things that a strong human would never consider >for purely pragmatic reasons. I mentioned at the time, while Shredder was still >well in the plus, that it was playing with fire. (Gromit did the same thing, >turning a simple draw into a wild ride that it lost to Junior.) > >Your first obligation when you have such a position is to eliminate counterplay. >This isn't 100% possible against a strong opponent, but you certainly work to >simplify the position in order to keep control. The last thing you want is to >see the position sharpen so much that, despite your objective advantage, one >error in calculation can cost you the half or full point. > >Which is exactly what happened to Shredder. It's eval did not swing so much >because it evaluated the position incorrectly when it was at +5 (although it >does tend to be overoptimistic, like many programs, which is why I have so much >admiration for Junior's more conservative, and generally more accurate, evals), >but because it allowed the position, despite being advantageous, to get so sharp >that each half-ply meant life or death. This is often fatal for humans and >computers alike. > >Mikhail Tal would stir up unfathomable complications on the board because he >trusted his instincts and because he knew he could calculate better than anyone >in the world. But even Tal knew when it was time to simplify into a winning >endgame! Exactly! He once said in an interview that he did not mind going into won or very superior endgames (: José. >No matter how well you calculate, you don't give your opponent a batch >of passed pawns (if you can help it) if only because nobody is perfect and you >just might have missed something. > >Programs are vulnerable here because they always play the "best move," and not >the most practical move. They can't see the inherent complexity of a coming >position, just the eval. Don't blame Shredder for the Rd8 blunder; that's the >symptom, not the disease that all comps face. Programming common sense is much >harder than programming genius. > >It would be interesting to have an uncertainty variable in the mix that would >help a program distinguish between a line that is winning with low risk and >another that is a tightrope walk. > >Saludos, Mig > >http://www.kasparovchess.com
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