Author: martin fierz
Date: 17:19:42 09/09/02
Go up one level in this thread
On September 09, 2002 at 12:25:03, Rolf Tueschen wrote: >Let's go back to education in school and university. Leaving eidetic people >aside. I know for sure that you would never accept if students cheated with all >kind of hidden help during examinations. You would say that students should be >able to "think" for the correct answers. Looking at the help and then telling >what is written there as perfect answer, this isn't making any sense. > >So, this is the ethic we all know and obey to. this is just not true. in many exams at my university, we were allowed to bring along any material we wanted. the real question you want to have answered by an exam is: can the student give you the correct answer? it doesnt matter if he looks this up in a book, or figures it out himself. a student who knows nothing at all will not know what book to bring, or where to look up. once you start working seriously, not in artificial exam situations, it is always allowed to look up stuff you did earlier, or you read in a book but dont remember the details. would you go to a doctor who tells you "i will not look up in my books if i don't know what you have got?" - i don't think so! >How could you explain why it is so difficult to convince chess programmers and >probably checkers programmers too, that the usage of "perfect" databases in >tournaments is absolutely odd tradition and should be regarded as unethical? easy to explain... because your whole argument is completely arbitrary. computers and humans arrive at the same ends (playing a game well) by totally different means. you want to forbid the computers from doing something they are good at. if your arguments were valid, you could also say: "wait, a human can only look at 3 positions per second. therefore, all computer programs must be limited to searching at that speed." you CANNOT compare the way humans and programs work. besides, for the endgame TB case in checkers, if i really cared, i could use my computer to produce a big set of rules which allow it to decide with 99% certainty whether a given 6-piece checkers position is a win or a loss or a draw. the playing strength of such a program would be nearly the same as of the program with perfect information. so your argument against tables would be circumvented, and the program would be nearly the same as before. but give me one single reason to do this... just to satisfy rolf tueschen? i have tested my program playing with 4-piece / 6-piece / 8-piece endgame databases. the difference in playing strength is actually much smaller than you might expect. what really improves is the quality of the evaluation, i.e. if you get to close to the db, the program with the db will just say draw or win, while the one without it will say +a little or + a lot aloha martin
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