Author: Robert Henry Durrett
Date: 16:42:25 06/22/02
Go up one level in this thread
On June 22, 2002 at 18:50:12, Mike S. wrote: >On June 22, 2002 at 10:42:46, Robert Henry Durrett wrote: > >>On June 22, 2002 at 06:45:54, Mike S. wrote: >>(...) >>>which were selected for human training or reading pleasure so to speak, nasty >>>things like in-between moves (which may be unimportant for the human when they >>>are obviously waste of time), can ruin the test positions. >> >>Interested in better understanding of "nastiness" of in-between moves, as it >>applies to computer test suites. What "nasty" problems are caused by this? > >Some engines will play the intended solution immediatly, some others might see >it too, but will play the in-between move before (i.e. a strong but simply >refuteable threat) which delays the solution move. In these cases, you can't >measure the solution time of the program which plays the in-between move, in the >original test position. Afterwards it's a different position. Also there will be >engines which play the in-between move but would not have found the solution >move previously (which you can never really tell because of that). IOW, useless >for a test suite. > >In practise, demands are even more strict. For example, when I released my >Quicktest, I was not aware that many people use test suites (seemingly only) >with *automatic* testsuite processing functions. Some of those functions can't >handle avoid move tests. So these program "solved" the am positions by "finding" >the wrong move immediatly... :o) > >But I keep the am positions, and ask people to test manually. It takes only ~30 >mins total. It's also much more informative IMO, to watch the thinking process >of the various engines "live". > >>One idea which intrigues me that it may be possible to write a program which >>would search a large database of games to find positions which meet the criteria >>you suggest. Ever heard of anything like that? Think it is a good idea? I >>realize that the only large databases would be of human games, but maybe that's >>unavoidable? > >(see posting above) >http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?237027 > >That describes the "manual" method. It should be possible to write a program >which finds such evaluation jumps (especially if both engines show one), if the >annotations/search info follow a standard format of some kind, i.e. from a PGN >file. Maybe such a program even exists, I don't know. But such a program could >only guess, IOW. offer a "rough" selection of positions which *may* be useful. Perhaps that would be a significant accomplishment. It would reduce the size of the collection and might avoid further consideration of useless positions. As I see it, the process should be automated to the maximum extent practical, to minimize the remaining "manual" work. Perhaps the search criteria could be improved also. Bob D. > >Another idea is to quickly browse through games in the Fritz or ChessBase GUI, >with the *material* info line on (or in another program which shows the material >balance in a similar way). Usually, the (tactical) interesting positions will be >somewhere near the changes of the material balance. For example, if the winning >program gets behind in material. Which most often means that it has played a >successful sacrifice. Same comments as above apply here too. > >I think I found a lot of test positions that way. > >Regards, >M.Scheidl Bob D.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.