Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 21:00:32 08/15/02
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On August 15, 2002 at 22:42:26, Peter McKenzie wrote: >I pretty much disagree with everything you said. > >Its perfectly possible to be super strong without any big secrets. Attention to >detail, improving the little things, and a whole lot of blood sweat and tears >will get you a very long way. Oh, and did I mention testing? Good testing >helps heaps. > >5% inspiration, 95% perspiration :-) I like, "No pain...no pain!" :) >Of course, some commercial engines have big secrets, but I don't think they are >necessary to be super strong. What I said shouldn't apply 100% to 100% of the all commercial engines. A perfect example is that Junior does not use null-move forward pruning. There is no way possible to take well known techniques, subtract null-move, and be one of the best in the world. Conclusion: "big secrets". Tiger doesn't use null-move to a large degree, and makes use of other forward pruning techniques. IIRC, Rebel doesn't (or didn't) use null-move in the past, and was still among the strong commercial engines. I don't know about Fritz, but IMO if you take things that are well known and put in a ton of work, you might surpass Crafty, but I think you're still only going to be at a level of Gandalf, which seems to be a step or two behind the Fritz's, Junior's, etc. of the computer chess world. I would find it very hard to believe that there aren't quite a few significant secrets in the commercial programs. Sure, it's possible that *some* don't have any big secrets and simply make use of well known methods which have been refined for many years, but even if there are a few of those, there are three I could think of off the top of my head that must make use of some "big secret" or else they would not be as good as they are. I mean if you take the well known methods, subtract null-move, you're looking at maybe a branching factor of 4-5 at best, **UNLESS** you are using some other method that is not public knowledge, AKA a secret. The top engines consistently have branching factors between 2-3, and since we know that some either use null-move to only a small degree or do not use it at all, we know that there must be something that they are doing to achieve such great results. I'd like to know what you think about all of this. Russell
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