Author: Don Dailey
Date: 21:51:39 06/20/98
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On June 20, 1998 at 23:59:10, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On June 20, 1998 at 14:11:22, Don Dailey wrote: > >>On June 20, 1998 at 13:08:55, Robert Pawlak wrote: >> >>>Subject line says it all. With engines being as strong as they are today, I >>>believe that the ability to dumb-down your software is very important. >>> >>>Perhaps the question about playing styles was supposed to encompass this >>>ability? In either case, this might be an interesting question for future polls. >> >> >>I thought every program had settable levels? In what way do you want >>it to be handicapped? >> >>- Don > > >levels don't cut it. I watched someone running a crafty last night >playing with st=.01, and it was running at 2300 for several dozen games >without thinking on opponent's time. That's still *way* too strong for >most players in the world, because on a good machine that is still several >plies. > >It's a common complaint... In Socrates I had a feature that was very popular with people. They could set the level by rating. Basically me and Larry worked out a formula so that the opponent could ask for 1200 USCF and Socrates would figure out about how many nodes to search. It was independent of hardware too, so 1200 was 1200. I don't remember what the lowest level was but I think we tried to make it about the same as a 1 ply search. Thinking on the opponents time was not used at these levels, or if it was the search always stopped at the estimated level. Another common technique is to have a very restricted quies search. I think some of the Novag machines had this. At the very lowest level you might have a 1 ply search with 1 or zero ply of quies search. You could also have a dumb evaluation function. I think it's hard to dumb it down too much without is seeming very artificial. Probably by eliminating a lot of the evaluation AND restricting a 1 ply search could give you a program that acted like a real ameteur. A lot of programs play quite good with a real 1 ply search, and would easily beat beginners and advanced beginners who typically drop pieces fairly often. - Don
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