Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:43:13 06/24/98
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On June 24, 1998 at 13:34:14, Ernst A. Heinz wrote: >On June 24, 1998 at 12:45:12, Bruce Moreland wrote: >> >>Yes, but now that I have you backing up, I'll give you another push. > >You are very welcome to try to do so ... :-) > >>If a program sees a sacrifice because of some cool spiritual zen positional >>artifically intelligent thing, that is wonderful. >> >>But if it thinks it is winning a cold hard substantial material pawn down a bad >>15-ply variation it is kind of hard to get too excited. >> >>Given that it seems common to want to play this, and we are not all perfect >>examples of zen positional spirituality, I suspect the latter. >> >>In particular I shake my head at the responses that seems to say, "look how zen >>positional spiritual program X is, it finds this in 3 seconds at ply 6." The >>move is wrong, and it is probably being selected for material reasons, gimme a >>break. >> >>So we're all materialist pigs here, getting our comeupance for making a greedy >>move that just happens to look zen positional spiritual. > >I violently disagree with your "materialistic assessment". The programs that >like any of the two sacrifices (Nxe6, Rxe6) seem to be happy to trade material >for the attacking chances they see and score within their search horizon. In >this particular case, the speculation turns out to be wrong -- so what? So it's a hole. And even though it looks tiny, a player like Anand will drive a semi tractor-trailer through it, stretch it impossibly big, and then rip your guts out through it. Gross metaphor, but you get the idea. playing against such players, you simply can leave *any* hole unfilled. Or he will find it, and exploit it, *over and over and over* since the program won't be able to self-repair itself between games. If anyone wants their program to sac like Tal, that's fine. But to induce such a strategy in a program, in order to prepare for playing GM's seems somewhat risky, to say the least. you want to *plug* holes, not *open* them up. A good GM is already capable of finding most of our weaknesses. I don't see the point in adding more. Preventing blocked positions, or keeping things open, is not the same thing at all. And sacrificing a bit of positional compensation here, for a little positional "gain" over there is probably ok. But tossing material and hoping to get an attack will work against weak players, but leads to self-immolation (pouring gasonline on yourself, followed by striking a match) against players like Anand. I've done some wildly speculative things at times, and have even had cases where Crafty pulled off a stunning sacrifice that beat a GM. But he came right back and won the next 10 games exploiting that same aspect. Once you "show your cards" if you were bluffing, the next time you expect to get your bluff called, with bad results... > >As for the "program P finds move X in time T and iteration Y" posts in >general, you are right -- but sometimes its just nice to tell the world >that your program solves interesting positions ... :-) > >=Ernst=
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