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Subject: Re: Rating Points and Evaluation Function

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 22:36:37 05/27/02

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On May 26, 2002 at 19:46:54, Robert Henry Durrett wrote:

>On May 20, 2002 at 15:41:47, Eric Baum wrote:
>
>>On May 20, 2002 at 15:05:15, Russell Reagan wrote:
>>
>>>I would bet that a program with an evaluation function that primitive wouldn't
>>>break the 2000 elo mark, or maybe between 2000-2100 at best. Of course I could
>>>be wrong and someone like Bob or Dan Corbit could tell you better the
>>>differences between a program with a simple evaluation function vs. a program
>>>with a complex one,
>>
>>Hopefully one of the experts will respond :^)
>>
>>>There are programs like this, and they do learn new features. They generally use
>>>neural nets or something like that. They also generally stop improving at about
>>>a beginner level.
>>
>>I'm only interested in ones that actually do better...
>>
>>>
>>>>Also, for comparison, does anybody have a recent estimate of rating
>>>>point gain per additional ply of search?
>>>
>>>I don't, but someone does I'm sure. I would guess however that at some point you
>>>aren't going to get many more rating points, and then once you reach a really
>>>deep depth, you will start to see more jumping up of the rating, then another
>>>diminishing returns area, then another jump, and so on, until you reach a ply
>>>depth where you solve the game.
>>
>>Hsu used to give talks graphing rating increase vs ply and claimed something
>>like a 200 point increase per ply (I'm just going from memory, so number might
>>be in error). He used to claim, I think, that this increase would continue
>>to arbitrary depth. (Of course, he was trying to convince IBM management to
>>continue funding development of his parallel machine, but subsequent events
>>lent some credence to his previous prognostication.)
>>
>>
>>>And since I don't even know what "context dependent forward pruning" is, maybe
>>>you could explain that :)
>>
>>What I mean is some method of doing something like what humans do:
>>deciding to pursue some lines of search and abandon others, based on the
>>board position.
>
>When people talk nowadays about "forward pruning," are they doing that only at
>the start position prior to search, or do they also do this at later points in
>the search?  Intuitively, it seems there would be a tradeoff between the time
>required to do additional position evaluations [later in the search] versus the
>improved quality of the rationale for additional pruning.  In other words, a
>series of pruning activities might give the best evaluation tree following the
>original position to be evaluated.

http://www.ginko.de/user/volker.pittlik/schach/lexikon/What-is-Forward-Pruning.html

http://www.isr.umd.edu/TechReports/ISR/1993/TR_93-57/TR_93-57.phtml

http://www.seanet.com/~brucemo/topics/nullmove.htm

>
>>Logistello, for example, does additional pruning beyond
>>alpha-beta in Othello, and the Deep Blue crowd tried singular extensions,
>>but again the singular extensions never added much to their ratings either.
>>These were forward pruning methods, but didn't really look at the board
>>position, really only looked at the evaluation of the board and evaluation of
>>other lines
>>to make a decision what to prune. So singular extensions prunes when one line
>>is much more highly evaluated than others, independent of what the actual
>>positions are, but my understanding is SI didn't lead to much gain. Is there any
>>serious forward pruning going
>>on, leading to real ratings improvements? And if so, is anybody gaining
>>from pruning based on position as opposed to merely numerical evaluation?



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