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Subject: Re: Rating Points and Evaluation Function

Author: Roy Eassa

Date: 09:50:36 05/21/02

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On May 20, 2002 at 21:02:12, Pham Minh Tri wrote:

>>What are some other methods of pruning?
>
>The most famous, challenging and dangerous one is "filter": prune immediately
>stupid moves. This method is used in ChessTiger. You can read more from Q&A with
>Christophe:
>
>http://www.computerschach.de/sprechstunde/archiv/theron1e.htm


That's a great interview!  Thank you for posting the URL; I hadn't seen it
before.

Here's a GREAT quote from Christophe about improving your chess engine past the
2300 level:


From now on, your judgment alone is not enough to decide when a change is really
an improvement. If you rely only on your feelings, you are going to turn in
circles. You will add something or change something, and you might eventually
realize that this change has weakened your program.

For you the time of the easy improvements is gone. Every additional ELO point
from now on is going to be hard to earn. What you need now is a serious testing
methodology. You need to define an accurate way to decide if a change has
improved the playing strength of your program or not. Playing a few games
manually will not do it.

You probably need to write modules in your program dedicated to TESTING. For
example a module that will eat a set of EPD position and try to solve them, and
after the engine has crunched the positions you need to be able to output some
kind of statistics, and you must be able to compare the output with the output
of your current reference version.

Maybe you need to study a little bit of statistics (if you do not have the
required background already) to understand about things like margin of errors in
random events. Maybe you need to implement Auto232 in your program, so you can
get a large number of automatic results.

But from now on you will not make any significant progress without a serious
TESTING METHODOLOGY. So I would advice you to invest a lot of time in finding
and refining yours. A lot of time means several days, probably several weeks.



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