Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 10:35:12 05/07/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 07, 2002 at 07:44:16, Amir Ban 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...
>>
>>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.
>>
>
>Ok. I think this is wrong. Anyway I'm working for a long time under the
>assumption that it's the evaluation rather than the search that needs work.
>
>The search engine of Junior7 is basically the same as Junior6.
>
>Junior5 was the last engine where I did extensive work on the search. Since then
>in terms of effort it was at least 80% evaluation, no more than 20% search.
>
>Amir
Then your work is a real success. That makes a lot of elo points gained from
working almost exclusively on the evaluation.
How much in your opinion? As Junior 7 is 93 elo points stronger than Junior 5 on
K6-450 (with the usual error margin, of course), how much would you say come
from your work on the evaluation? 60? 70? 80??
I wouldn't have believed that it is possible, but obviously it is.
I guess that the fact that you have a strong chess player in the team has an
influence on the choice to work more on the evaluation, right?
Christophe
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