Author: martin fierz
Date: 21:35:11 02/11/02
aloha! there was just a discussion on "diminishing returns" in computer chess here, so i finally wrote up an experiment i did a year or two ago with my checkers program on my webpage: http://www.fierz.ch/strategy3.htm in contrast to an experiment by junghanns and schaeffer (i think?), where they used chinook to play series of 40 games against itself, i played 282 games per match, which leads to more reliable statistics - i think the error bar for the chinook values reported on the page above are about 5%, making the conclusions of that experiment questionable. it's much easier to find this kind of effect in computer checkers for two reasons: 1) the program can search much deeper 2) the "natural length scale" of a checkers game is much shorter than for a chess game. with this i mean that typically after a certain number of moves, the program will hit the endgame database, and from there on it will not matter how deep it searches. this leaves the deeper searching program with a decreasingly short number of plies where it can use it's superiority. my message is: this effect will show up in computer chess too - but it will take a looong time. cheers martin
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