Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 19:31:28 05/06/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 06, 2002 at 19:45:22, Uri Blass wrote:
>On May 06, 2002 at 18:06:47, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>>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...
>
>I think that people are different.
>
>There are people who will prefer the engine that is better in tactics and there
>are a lot of people who are going to prefer the engine that wins without caring
>for the reasons.
That's different when your program plays against a gransmaster in a public place
(or on the Internet).
>>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 do not understand like Amir what is the exact meaning of 10%.
>
>I believe that most of the amatuers can earn more rating from improvement in the
>search rules and not from improvement in the evaluation but I also think that
>the ratio is usually not 9:1 and I guess something like 2.5:1(I know that you
>did not say that the ratio is 9:1 but it is a possible way to understand the
>claim that search is responsible for 90% of the strength when evaluation is
>responsible for 10%)
:)
You do not understand the meaning of my 10%, but you suggest that it is another
number?
So you must understand what I am talking about, somehow...
>I guess that it is possible to improve most of the amatuers that are 400-600 elo
>weaker than Junior by average number of 100 elo by doing a lot of work only on
>the evaluation when you can improve them only by average number of 250 elo by
>doing the same amount of work on the search rules without changing the
>evaluation.
>
>The total improvement from working on both things may be bigger than the sum of
>100 and 250 because after improving the evaluation the best search rules may be
>different.
I don't think the proportion is measured in elo points.
My unit for the 90%/10% estimation is subjective. It's something like the amount
of reward for a given programming effort.
A successful effort in search get a reward 9 times bigger than a succesful
effort in positional evaluation.
Not to say that work on positional evaluation can be ignored.
I notice that some chess players tend also to agree that chess is essentially a
matter of search (tactics).
Christophe
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