Author: Will Singleton
Date: 07:00:25 07/31/98
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On July 31, 1998 at 09:26:14, John Scalo wrote: >I've recently gotten my little engine up on ICC (Frankenstein) and I'm wondering >what kind of rating swings are normal. A few days ago I watched in >disappointment as the rating dropped more than 200 points and figured one of the >minor changes I made wasn't so minor. But now it's slowly climbing back up. > >For those of you who have computer accounts on ICC, do you see such wild swings? > >Thanks, >John It's possible that small changes in the evaluation or other parts of a program will cause significantly weaker or stronger play, especially during a program's early development. Recall that we are playing pretty strong opponents, and there's not much room for error. Rating swings also occur due to chance, +-100 points or so. There was the case a while back for Exchess, where it dropped from 2300 to 2100, which the author attributed to a fault in the opening book. Once fixed, the rating jumped up to 2400 for awhile, and now it's around 2280, last time I Iooked. Another case is KnightC, which usually hangs around 2400-2500. A few weeks back I noticed it was under 2200. Now its back to normal. Amateur plays usually around 2250-2300. I made some changes to the eval last week, supposedly minor, which caused the thing to drop under 2100. A few fixes later, and it's back at 2280. All of the programs that are under active development, but especially those that are new, will swing around. I don't worry about it too much anymore, I mean nobody really cares what my rating is. But the real reason I don't care too much is that I know that this is still an early version, many improvements are there waiting to be done, and the rating will eventually reflect the work that goes into it. But it's not easy, even for an ace programmer such as yourself. It'll take a long time. Will
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