Author: Rolf Tueschen
Date: 07:15:44 05/20/02
Excuse me if I ask a question already answered a hundred times or more in this forum. Could someone explain, perhaps in understandable numbers of percentages, how important the strength of the engine is in chess programs, are there differences between commercial and amateur programs? Let me demonstrate a little thought experiment. If I would gauge (in 2002) the actually most known chess programs against say 1000 human chess players (first step) to get some insight into the Elo numbers, I would expect that the top programs would at best get Elo performances of 2200 - 2350, if I let the engines play without books and implemented book-like tricks. Now, if I'd do some comp vs comp over a period of a decade or such, I'd expect the leading engines to reach astonishing Elo of 2600, maybe 2700! So, what we had found were two things: without books engines would be outplayed by better human chessplayers but through imbreeding processes the Elo of the engines could still reach Super-GM Elos. Now, at that moment I'd organize show matches between the engines and former or actual champions, with a guaranteed sum of say 1 million of USD for the champion no matter if he'd looses or wins. What would be the next step? World champion the engine XY on 1 million GHz? A fair copy of this: Enough interest=money provided naked engines of chess programs would be dispersed by human players from the quality above expert status. Humans will learn to pay attention to the difficulty of tactical play resulting from the overall depth of 6 to 10 moves at maximum. The rest of the time will be used to discover typical exploitations of horizon. Humans will adapt to a completely different chess. New patterns/ algorithms will be developped for early spottings. Depending of the specific engine 'early' could well be a whole book with chapters about "Winning from move 1 on against FRITZ 25" or "How to survive in a fortress against JUNIOR 12b" etc. Still, we had the programs with books. Now, for these programs we need only players from a level of Elo 2500 upwards. Eidetical talents are absolutely required! Then we can repeat the whole procedures from above. Still, we had the Elo numbers due to our imbreeding technology. In pure comp vs comp matches we could still fabricate magic Elos (We let older programs play on older hardware vs new programs on new and stronger hardware!). Then we make some show events with tricky programs, with newest books doctored until the morning of the first game. The results affirmate by far our Elo numbers by imbreeding. But back to the question, what is the real strength of the chess engine? How would you measure it? When will the engine itself begin to reflect its 'chess'? How many years from now it will take to develop a real chessplaying robot who could participate in human tournaments completely on his own? Buying new books he reads, asking collegues for some information about this or that, differentiating between truth, lies and irony. ;-) Rolf Tueschen
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