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Subject: Re: Hello from Edmonton (and on Temporal Differences)

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 13:34:57 08/05/02

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On August 05, 2002 at 11:28:38, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote:

>On August 05, 2002 at 11:14:53, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>
>>On August 05, 2002 at 08:04:25, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>>
>>>I have played with it. I am convinced it has possibilities, but one problem I
>>>encountered was the cause-effect problem. For say I am a piece down. After I
>>>lost the game TD will conclude that the winner had better mobility and will tune
>>>it up. However worse mobility was not the *cause* of the loss, it was the
>>>*effect* of simply being a piece down. In my case it kept tuning mobility up and
>>>up until ridiculous values.
>>
>>Similar things will happen with passed pawn bonusses.
>
>From the comments of everybody it looks like this TDLeaf procedure is cute way
>to do a regression analysis of the parameters of the evaluation to fit a
>humongous amount of data.

>In a general sense, when you do any kind of non linear regression analysis, this
>kind of things happen (parameters that go crazy) when you have parameters that
>are not independent. This is a message to the researcher to express the equation
>in a different manner to have parameters that are "more" independent or to fix
>one of those.
>I have never applied the method that you are describing but to me it looks like
>that failure is an extremely useful information because it tells that the layout
>of the parameters in the evaluation is probably not the optimal (at least for
>that procedure).

Or in normal words: learners that don't optimize parameter for parameter
are doomed to fail, because the error margin of a single parameter is not
acceptible to chess programs.

You don't put 'passed pawn bonus' into a program in order to get a
negative penalty for example. You don't put the pawn value in front of
the king at +1.2 in order to find out that the autotuner tunes it at +12.0,
because you by accident used a tactical testset :)

In diep parameters are accurate at 1/1000 of a pawn.

All automatic tuning methods however are not capable to tune within 0.25
of a pawn. At a big set deviations of 2 to 3 pawns occur.
That's a too rude granularity, especially if +0.25 gets -1.0 or 0.10 getting
1.5

The lack of domain dependant knowledge automatically means that the only
form of tuning is to tune each parameter independant. I doubt whether
that's possible within O (n log n).

More logical assumption is O (n*n*n) and we will forget about the problem
of determining things in 1/1000 of a pawn then, because n^3 is already
a too big factor.

If you consider that some bonuses i give are 0.001 pawn and other
penalties are 5 pawns, then we realize that between

-5000 to +5000 = 10000 values, tuning within that isn't easy.

However you can try to do it binary. the log out of 10000 values is
neglectible at (n^3) which is needed to tune each parameter.

Nevertheless to spare myself reading
a long story on how good it is nowadays and
that it is possible in perhaps O (n log n) in the future, even n log n
is already too many millions of hours of system time.

Best regards,
Vincent

>Regards,
>Miguel

>>
>>--
>>GCP



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