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Subject: Re: Closest link between a statistic and playing strength

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 23:06:58 12/06/01

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On December 07, 2001 at 01:13:34, Dann Corbit wrote:

>There are lots and lots of statistics you can use.  All of them are pretty well
>useless except won/loss/draw against opponents of known strength.
>
>Here are some reasons why:
>Suppose that I have a material only evaluation, and absurd pruning rules.  I can
>search like the burning blue blazes, but it will play like total crap.

Granted, that if the rest of the program is poor, then no matter how many
millions of NPS you're getting, you're not going to have a strong program. I
thought your saying, "search like the burning blue blazes" was quite humorous
also :)

>Plys are probably one of the best indicators.  However, if the eval is no good,
>neither are the plys worth anything.
>

So for improving the raw performance of your own program, against only itself,
some of these statistics are good tools then, correct? If my eval function is
bad, then I should work on improving it, but my program will play better if it's
searching twice as deep with a bad eval function than if it's searching half as
deep with that same bad eval function. That's what I was really after. Improving
a program relative to itself, not to other programs (although I would suspect
that if you improved your ply depth, all other things remaining the same, that
the program would perform somewhat better against other programs).



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