Author: Don Dailey
Date: 10:52:30 05/13/98
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On May 13, 1998 at 13:06:56, Christophe Theron wrote: >On May 13, 1998 at 07:14:16, Ralph Jörg Hellmig wrote: > >>So if there is a special time control, one program may play positionally >>better, but the other one has better tactics, for example, the >>positional better program will be stronger if the time control >>increases, as it does also see the deciding tactics ... > >Another chess legend. > >Who has any proof of this statement? I have empirical evidence of it. That is if you mean longer time (or faster hardware) favors the program with more knowledge. >More knowledge better at longer time controls? Take a look at the top of >the SSDF list, sit down a minute, and think again about this legend. > >I think that if you have more time to compute, you need LESS knowledge. >We still have to find which kind of knowledge is needed in this case, >and which other can be thrown out happily. > > > > Christophe Hi Guys, I used to believe strongly that with faster and faster hardware, knowledge becomes less important. The reason I believed this was that eventually all programs would converge on a game theoretic solution, which is essentially proof of this concept. HOWEVER, at the depths we are currently doing (and for the forseeable future) it seems that the opposite is true. I did a big experiment where many programs with varying amounts of knowledge played each other. I generated hundredes of thousands of games on several computers over several weeks of time. What happend was that the programs with the most knowledge, improved very rapidly with depth compared to the programs with little knowledge. I suspect with a great amount of depth, the knowledgable programs would not be able to improve very much since they would be close to "perfect while the dumb ones would be playing catch-up. But it looks like we are a long way away from these ranges at current time controls on modern hardware. About your reference to Fritz. Is Fritz really so bad at positional chess? Some people confuse conservative play with bad chess. Could this be the case here? It's hard for me to believe Fritz could be that horrible and still be on top just due to a little extra speed. I'll bet you will find that it's evaluation is reasonable, well balanced and not as bad as it's reputation. It's my understanding also that Franz has added knowledge gradually over time to keep up. The thing I notice about Fritz is that even on 1 ply, most of its moves are reasonable, at least positionally. - Don
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