Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 09:53:13 05/07/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 06, 2002 at 13:09:45, Christophe Theron wrote: >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 for chessprograms things are different. Not a single one of them misses obvious tricks nowadays. It's book + evaluation dominated simply.
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.