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Subject: Re: Questions about Tridgell/Baxter's paper on TDLeaf

Author: James Swafford

Date: 04:29:39 10/22/01

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On October 22, 2001 at 06:24:45, Rémi Coulom wrote:

>On October 21, 2001 at 07:06:41, James Swafford wrote:
>
>>On October 21, 2001 at 02:37:09, Rémi Coulom wrote:
>>
>>>On October 21, 2001 at 00:11:23, James Swafford wrote:
>>>
>>>If your evaluation function is, say, f(w_1, w_2, ..., w_n), then the partial
>>>derivative of f with respect to weight w_i is the limit of
>>>(f(w_1, ..., w_i + epsilon, ..., wn) - f(w_1, ..., w_i, ..., w_n)) / epsilon
>>>when epsilon goes to zero. In practice, you can estimate this value by measuring
>>>the ratio above with a very small value of epsilon.
>>
>>
>>That is starting to make sense, but I'll have to sit down and think
>>about it later today.  What is a reasonable value for epsilon?
>>
>
>If your function and weights are integers, this is a not easy to make a good
>choice. Maybe epsilon = 1 or epsilon = 2 would work. The trick is that epsilon
>should be large enough so that changing w_i to w_i + epsilon changes the
>evaluation function if the derivative is not zero.
>
>I have not implemented TD(lambda) for my own chess program yet, but I suppose I
>would make a floating point evaluation function in that case. With a floating
>point evaluation, things are much easier. For instance, taking epsilon to be
>1/1000 of the typical weight value should work nicely. An optimal value for
>epsilon could be found, but this really is no big deal. Accuracy is not
>important at all.
>
>Remi
>

Thank you Remi... this helps quite a lot.

--
James



>Remi



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