Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:22:33 06/24/02
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On June 24, 2002 at 09:22:41, Vladimir Medvedev wrote: >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? 1. Book learning is a critical need for programs. Otherwise their deterministic behavior would result in a very boring repetition of the same opening moves over and over. When you add a book with some randomness, you will, by definition, include some bad moves as well. If you don't have a way to discard moves that turn out to be bad, then you end up in even more trouble than when you didn't have an opening book. 2. Position learning is another "book defense" mechanism. When someone finds a shallow book line and takes you out quickly, they will repeat the opening over and over, and keep improving their position after you leave book until you lose, and then it happens over and over... Position learning helps pass information back to positions where you leave the book early, so that you can at least get some variety there. 3. automatic evaluation tuning/learning is not something I have tried. Arthur Samuels tried it in his checker program, but it never seemed to work particularly well. Since Chess was so much more complicated, in terms of evaluation, I simply never became interested in the idea. Others have. One program that played pretty well on ICC was named "knightcap" and it seemed to learn at least passably well over time. It was certainly interesting...
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