Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 10:09:45 05/06/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 06, 2002 at 01:05:23, Uri Blass wrote:
>On May 05, 2002 at 19:58:09, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>>On May 05, 2002 at 19:25:07, stuart taylor wrote:
>>
>>>I mean, where are we? I cannot make it out yet.
>>>Can we safely say that a top program of today can beat all programs from before
>>>1996, i.e. 1995 and below?
>>
>>
>>Year of release?
>>
>>Wrong thinking.
>>
>>What you need to consider is the number of years the programmer has spent
>>actively working on his program.
>>
>>That gives much better figures.
>>
>>Genius 5 is a program of 1996, but it represents approximately 15 years of hard
>>work by Richard Lang.
>>
>>Now consider an amateur program of 2002, on which the programmer works since
>>1996.
>>
>>Are you going to compare 1996 and 2002 and decide that the 2002 program is
>>probably better?
>
>The amateur of 2002 has the advantage that the programmer could get more ideas
>about programming from reading and also could do better testing thanks to better
>hardware and software.
>
>I can give you one example for the last point and it was about testing to find
>bugs in my move generator:
>
>There are a lot of programs that calculate today the perft function for every
>position(perft 6 is the number of legal games of 6 moves from the position) .
>They helped to find bugs in my complicated move generator(if I see that perft 5
>is not correct then I can find the bug by finding a position when perft 4 is
>wrong,finding a position when perft 3 is wrong...).
>
>I guess that many years ago there was no free software to calculate that
>function and even if there was software to do it the hardware caused it to be
>clearly slower so testing and finding bugs was an harder task.
>
>>about when they talk about knowledge) makes for 10% of the strength of a chess
>>program.
>>
>>Chess is 90% about tactics (which is a concept close to "search").
>
>It is possible that evaluation may be more important but programmers failed to
>write the right evaluation to prove it.
You are right.
I consider that current top chess programs, compared to top human chess players,
are at the 50% level in search and 20% in evaluation.
I do not even know if it is 50/20, considering that top human ches players, who
are thousands of times slower, can equal or dominate the top chess programs
running on top hardware.
So there is ample room for improving, that's the good news.
But I still believe that the proportion in chess is 90% importance for search
and 10% for evaluation.
There is more room for improvement in evaluation (in percentage relative to the
skills of human players), but it still represents a minor part compared to
potential improvements in search.
Christophe
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