Author: martin fierz
Date: 15:31:32 09/09/02
Go up one level in this thread
On September 09, 2002 at 04:58:21, Ingo Althofer wrote: >Yesterday I found the homepage of Martin Fierz, and on this his interesting >report on the computer Checkers tournament that had been played in Las Vegas >some weeks ago. The article is nicely written and worth reading, even for normal >computer chess enthusiasts. See www.fierz.ch/vegas.htm > >However, there is a point where I disagree with the author. In a few remarks - >and maybe mainly between lines - the reader gets the impression that the author >has not a very high opinion of Jonathan Schaeffer's work in the Chinook project. hi ingo! you have to take the report as what it is: a very personal account of my experience in las vegas. it is not a scientific paper, more a casual write-down of my impressions during and right after the tournament. personally, i rather read honest accounts of what's going on in people's brains than reading some kind of censored version after the fact, and that's why i wrote it this way. well, i guess i should clarify this thing about chinook that you read between the lines: there is no doubt for me that chinook was a good program, and that it's authors did a great job, especially in computing the endgame databases on hardware which wasn't really up to the job. i don't mean to belittle *anything* they have done in making chinook into what it was. the situation with chinook is very similar to what computer chess has with deep blue: a program which was running on hardware so much faster than anybody else, that you simply cannot tell whether the program itself was also really good, or if it was mainly the hardware. personally, i find it sad that schaeffer & co did not come to play in las vegas, as it would have been really interesting to see how good chinook was as program, not as hardware. but yes, as you read betwen the lines, i do not have a terrible lot of respect for what the chinook team did *after* winning the man-machine title. 1) they published their endgame database with access code which is so terribly bad that you can hardly understand it. it does not work for the 8-piece db. so they *must* have different access code of their own, which also probably is much cleaner and faster, and they don't publish it. why? if you don't believe what i say about that access code, just look at it... you talk about "small-mindedness about user-unfriendliness". it's not about "unfriendly". it's about "unusable". and about the fact that ed gilbert lost his chance to win this championship because they didn't publish the better version of their access code. imagine eugene giving out a version of his tablebase access code which is both inefficient and unable to handle anything but 4-piece EGTBs, when he really had a 4x faster version at home which could handle everything. would chess programmers be happy about that? 2) schaeffer said on the phone to our referee, mac banks (who is a person i respect, and who i think incapable of lying about this): "why aren't the best programs playing in las vegas?". i don't know what he said this for, but yes, i do take offense at such statements :-) 3) schaeffer is continuoulsy dodging the question whether chinook is now retired or not. officially it is, but he says he will have to think about defending his title. either you're retired or you're not. again, he said something on the phone which i can't follow: "chinook is retired. but as a scientist, i'd like to see how it does against today's programs". if that is really what he wanted, he should have played in las vegas. with the chance to play all serious other programs. >And in my mind it is also ok when in the forthcoming title match Chinook as the >defender will keep its title when the match ends in a draw. Chinook did its job >years before the others did, and therefore they deserve this advantage. i disagree with you here. 1) doing something first is not the same as doing something best. a title should reflect the fact that a program is the best, and not that it was there first IMO. computer chess world championships are organized in a much more democratic way. all organizations which have "defending champions" run into trouble because of this, all the time. chess. checkers. boxing. you name it! 2) if you play a match of checkers against a program like nemesis or kingsrow, which have great opening books, you will very likely not win a single game in 100. the advantage of having drawing odds under those circumstances is that you are virtually guaranteed to keep your title. IMO that is just not right. these programs are so good, that you could take one of them, and have it play a match against itself in a version running on a high-end PC, and the other on hardware half as good. the result would most likely be N draws, even for N=100. although one version is *objectively* much better than the other, because it always finds the best move in half the time. would you really want a program which is objectively worse than another to be called "champion?" finally, i have a contribution to make to the discussion "was chinook better than tinsley?", which started somewhere else in this thread, with bob saying tinsley was certain he would lose the match. of course, we can never answer the question, so it's all speculation, but let me give you my version of the speculation: the follow-up match chinook-lafferty, ended with +1=18-1. if you look at the games, you will find that chinook made two mistakes in 20 games: it lost a game which was a draw, and it drew a game where it had a win. my personal 2 speculative conclusions from this are: 1) if lafferty was able to draw a match against chinook, it is well possible that tinlsey would have managed that too. it has been said that lafferty played very conservatively, trying to draw all the time. tinsley was known for his cautious play - he would probably have had a similar approach to the match. note that i'm dodging the question of "was chinook better than tinsley?". i'm just saying, it is possible that tinsley could have drawn a match, even if he was maybe already a bit weaker than chinook - drawing odds are just HUGE in top-level checkers... 2) chinook made two serious (result-changing) mistakes in 20 games. it was not as close to perfection as people generally think at the time it played that match. and there were errors in it's endgame database too... aloha martin
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.