Author: James Swafford
Date: 18:33:29 07/31/02
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On July 31, 2002 at 17:49:05, Jay Scott wrote: >On July 30, 2002 at 22:43:36, James Swafford wrote: > >>why isn't >>everyone doing it?? > >In my view, it's because top chess programmers are amazingly conservative. Or to >look at it more positively, they have a lot of time invested in and knowledge >gained about their traditional manual methods, and they do not believe in making >big changes. It's hard to argue with success! > >Over the years I've posted a bunch of machine learning suggestions (few of them >original to me) to rec.games.chess.computer and to this forum. Maybe it's my >writing style or something, but in every single case the general first reaction >was to ignore or dismiss the idea. That happened even when I pushed opening book >learning, which was not used in chess programs at the time but has become common >since. Arthur Samuels' classic checkers program already used a similar kind of >rote learning, so nobody should call it a radical new idea, but despite >seemingly obvious advantages it somehow took decades to show up in chess >programs. > >Another problem is that many of the people who've played around with learning >algorithms were only playing around. It takes serious knowledge to create a good >learning program, and different serious knowledge to create a good playing >program, and you have to have both to get really impressive results. Nobody's >done it yet. > >My advice for those who have great new ideas: Implement them yourself and become >a smashing success. *That's* convincing. The only problem is that to become a >smashing success, you'll also have to implement a lot of great old ideas. I agree with you. I have studied TD-Leaf for a while, and I am definitely going to pursue creating a strong TD chess player. One of my biggest concerns was the time to train a complex evaluator. I spoke with Rich Sutton about this today, and he convinced me that it's doable. -- James
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