Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 15:06:47 05/06/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 06, 2002 at 15:34:01, Amir Ban wrote:
>On May 05, 2002 at 19:58:09, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>>
>>"Knowledge" in the sense of positional evaluation (that's what most people think
>>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").
>>
>
>Before strongly disagreeing (as I guess I will), what does this mean ?
>
>If I freeze my search engine and work only to improve the evaluation, how much
>do you expect the total strength to improve ? Is it limited ?
I expect the strength of your engine to improve, but not much in regard to the
energy invested. Because you are going to focus your efforts on an area that
does not have the biggest potential in strength.
On the other hand people will love it more and more because it will have a much
better playing style.
People can forgive gross tactical blunders, but not slight positional mistakes.
Go figure...
Here I'm talking about current top engines of today, naturally.
Building a chess engine with a broken evaluation to demonstrate that a better
evaluation could improve it tremendously is not in the spirit of my idea.
>I understand that you are saying that it will change the style but overall
>strength will not be much changed.
I do not know exactly how far we will be able to go with the 10% I attribute to
positional evaluation.
I'm not saying it counts for nothing and that overall strength will not benefit
from research in this area.
I believe that the positional evaluation is the part of a chess program
responsible for only 10% of the strength, and that the rest is done by the
search.
I believe that the positional evaluation is responsible for most of what people
perceive as the "playing style".
Now you can strongly disagree, I do not have the absolute truth.
Christophe
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