Author: Don Dailey
Date: 13:20:50 05/13/98
Go up one level in this thread
On May 13, 1998 at 13:57:46, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On May 13, 1998 at 13:26:26, Don Dailey wrote: > >> >>Before the 1993 ICCA tournament me and Larry put our last tweaks in >>Socrates, played 2 test games with Genius on equal hardware and won >>both games!!! Wow, that's 100% score. We can beat Genius EVERY >>time! We went on to actually win this tournament, but subsequent >>testing showed we were weaker than the Genius we tested against. >> >>- Don > >This is a "typical programmer analyis" by Vincent... but he forgets >that >*everyone* has bugs. In fact, in the last two weeks, against one of his >three copies on ICC two games were lost by crafty in totally won >positions, >because I had a SMP bug that would get crafty/xboard out of sync, crafty >would keep thinking and never see the move, letting its flag fall. So >there's >no way to say that "these 4 games" are more revealing than "those 100 >games" >because in those 100 games "I had a bug". In "those 100 games, probably >*both* had bugs.... Hi Bob, I'm a firm believer that bugs can kill more rating points than anything else. This program I mentioned in my post was the most debugged program I ever brought to a tournament, lo and behold it manages to win! But just as important is the sample size. 4 games are ridiculous few to base any strength claims on. In fact a single 5 round tournament is not very telling either in my opinion, except that your program has to be in good shape to win. In this same tournament, we beat Genius, Mchess and Rebel and got a draw against Cray Blitz remember? But I don't believe my program was better that any of these programs. It was just "within striking range" of them which means (by my definition) that's it's not so much weaker that it's unlikely to win an individual game. I have a question for you which I'll bet you've answered before for others: From a pure software standpoint, is Crafty a better program than Blitz? Please don't consider the engineering factors like cray assembler or special highly hardware dependent things. - Don
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.