Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: What is "learning"?

Author: Vladimir Medvedev

Date: 06:22:41 06/24/02


Many chess programs, both commertial and amateur, are announced as "learning"
ones. Of course, their learning ability is something different than human's one.
AFAIK, there are two main cases of learning:

1. Opening learning, when program gets some opening statistics and then avoid
unfortunate opening lines (as Fritz does).
2. Evaluation function learning - but not in it's main structure, only by tuning
some parameters and weights. Using some sophisticated techniques like temporal
difference etc.

Now the questions:

Does anybody know, are there any other methods of learning?
Does learning really improve playing strength?
Are learning abilities really useful and fruitful feature for chess program, or
mostly marketing bells and whistles?



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.