Author: Steve Maughan
Date: 01:21:10 07/31/02
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Dann, >>program is *probably* better than the other. The point of the series of games >>was to quickly establish if Tao or Pepito had improved significantly - the >>conclusion being that they were still *about* the same strength. > >I think that conclusion is not warranted. The are about the same strength in >relation to each other. I suspect that their strength has changed. Yes it's an ambiguous statement - I meant relative to each other. >It [accepting 95% confidence] also means that with 5% of the trials you will >choose a wrong conclusion. > >IOW, 37 heads and 25 tails is odd but not astonishing. If you want to be >really sure that something is an improvement, the question is "At what level >of risk am I willing to accept something as proven?" Yes this applies to everything in life!! IMO the bridge between probability and action (action being the outcome of 100% belief) is faith. As discussed in the NT book of Hebrews. >Obviously, the lower the risk, the more sound the decision. Of course, there >is a trade-off. If you wait until you are 99.99999999% certain, you will never >make any choice. Obviously, that is not a good strategy either. So it calls >for balance. This is what I mean by Nihilism. One can always say that the error bars are not wide enough to believe in a conclusion, forgetting the most likely outcome. It is my impression that over the last year whenever a series of games <1000 has been posted the reaction is - "it means nothing - too few games" - it doesn't mean nothing just the error bars mean that we cannot be 100% certain of the conclusion. Regards, Steve
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