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Subject: Re: Strength of the engine in chess programs

Author: martin fierz

Date: 17:04:21 05/20/02

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On May 20, 2002 at 10:15:44, Rolf Tueschen wrote:

>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

2200? you must be kidding! my rating is 2240 FIDE and even if i start all my
games against fritz with 1.h3 or some other (quite sensible) moves to take it
out of the book, i have no chance against it.
maybe someone here could experiment with a few top programs using no book
against other top programs.

>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.   ;-)

i wonder why you have a problem with chess engines using opening books. is it
that they did not find these moves on their own? if yes: can i ask you about
your opinion on a computer-generated opening book? that is, an opening book
which the chess engine works on day and night, finding opening lines all by
itself? it stores this information and can retrieve it instantly and without
failure (unlike humans), but unlike today's opening books it has computed
everything itself.
the reason i ask is that my checkers program has exactly such an opening book.
after only a few weeks of analysis of checkers openings, my book contains much
of the human opening theory for checkers, and some corrections of it. everything
was discovered by the engine itself. it could never find some of the moves "over
the board", but this book just serves as a memory for it's analysis - very much
like a human chess master.

computing such an opening book for chess is much harder, since there are many
more viable moves. but if you went on to write a screen saver application to
distribute the task, who knows - maybe something good will come of it.
incidentally, this is just what dann corbit is doing. jeroen noomen once wrote
me he also has had some success with automated opening book construction in
chess.

aloha
  martin



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