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Subject: Closest link between a statistic and playing strength

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 22:06:55 12/06/01


There are all kinds of statistics that you can formulate about a chess program,
the most notable being nodes per second. What statistic *should* imply a
stronger program? Obviously NPS is nice, but it's certainly not something you
can use to say that one program is stronger than another. I'm thinking that
number of plys would be a better indicator of strength, and I toyed with the
idea of some kind of nodes/ply kind of statistic.

The nodes/ply statistic obviously would give different results in different
positions, but for testing your own program, it seems like a good tool. For
example, if you did an 8 ply search and searched N nodes without the use of a
transposition table, and after implementing the transposition table you only
searched N/2 nodes (I have no idea what the actual gain would be) then that's
obviously good. Then again, that indirectly implies a deeper search, which makes
this statistic boil down to plys/sec (in the same position of course, with the
same program, otherwise results would vary widely).

Any ideas about other statistics or comments about my thoughts I've thrown out
here?

Russell



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