Author: martin fierz
Date: 20:40:12 09/09/02
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On September 09, 2002 at 23:05:24, Russell Reagan wrote: >So do you think that Schaeffer is acting in a similar way to IBM? Win a huge >match, then "retire" it because they know the real truth about it's strength? I >think that if Deep Blue would have played a dozen matches against the world's >top competition, it would have lost more matches than it won, and then the aura >surrounding Deep Blue wouldn't be what it is. Do you think the situation with >Chinook is similar? > >Russell hi russell, hmm, good question and kind of awkward for me: i already got bashed for saying what i did in my report, and if i were to say "yes" now, then i will probably get bashed some more :-) but well, to answer the question (to all of you who don't like what i say: this is just what i THINK - it is only my OPINION - and it is *not* rude to have an opinion!): i think chinook was clearly stronger than any human player, after the deaths of tinsley and lafferty, who were the world's strongest players. so no, in this sense, the situation is not similar - chinook would not have lost any matches against any competition at the time it retired. my best guess from the very little i know about the program is that it is "just another checkers program". many people here think deep blue was a really bad program compared to today's micros, and i don't think that goes for chinook. it would be interesting to compare it on equal hardware to today's programs. there is nothing that makes me think that it is either much better or much worse than the programs of today. there are the two blunders in the match against lafferty, but 1. AFAIK in one of the games, they had a problem with their computer and had to run on a weaker machine, and 2. i think that this type of comparison is fundamentally flawed (the "deep blue is crap" camp brings this form of argument up from time to time): out of maybe a 200 positions where chinook could make a mistake against lafferty in the match (where it was out of book and not yet in the database), we select the two where it did make a mistake. chances are good that my program doesn't make a mistake there (it doesnt). but chances are also very good that my program would make a mistake in one of the remaining 198 positions where chinook played the right move, so this type of comparison just doesnt work. so there is absolutely nothing i can compare my program against chinook with - unlike deep blue, where you have all the logfiles. comparing without logs, without knowing how fast chinook was searching in a particular position (they played on many different machines, depending on what was available, and sometimes had to switch because of problems. also, they had different parts of the endgame database at different times and i don't know what exactly they had when.), what it saw and when it saw it, is totally useless. there is much less to go on with chinook than with deep blue, and already there, opinions differ wildly. i guess that doesn't really answer your question :-) aloha martin
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