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Subject: Re: For Christophe Theron

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 10:08:16 04/15/02

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On April 14, 2002 at 20:00:55, Christophe Theron wrote:

>1) I do not know how to "tune" my program to make it better against a given
>opponent. I do not know how to "tune" for a given time control either. "Tuning"
>is something like an urban legend in computer chess. People have no idea of the
>difficulty to do this, so when they need to explain something strange they will
>say that some "tuning" has been done. People cannot admit that they do not know,
>so they'll use whatever obscure explanation they have at their disposal.
>"tuning" and "will be better at longer time controls" are great classics in this
>area.

I'll give an example.

My program has some areas of the evaluation that have a certain
weight and are somewhat independent. This could be kingsafety,
pawn structure, etc...

I have to find a balance between those. I did so by choosing a few
candidates on intuition that I thought would probably be the best,
and let them play >2000 games against a wide variety of amateur and
professional programs.

I pick the settings with the best performance.

I could do the same again, but only play one opponent at a time,
and remember which settings have the best score.

I have no idea whether the different settings would cause singnificantly
different performances vs certain opponents, though. But I will
certainly try this if I play another tournament.

>If I had more computers at my disposal I would not use them to play against my
>top competitors.

I find this an interesting statement. Since one only fixes weaknesses when
they are repeatedly exposed, one would want an opponent that is able to
pound them often. I would expect that your top competitors are best at this?

--
GCP



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