Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Comp-comp vs. comp-human: no difference!

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 10:36:46 09/01/98

Go up one level in this thread


On September 01, 1998 at 12:55:33, Tim Mirabile wrote:

>On September 01, 1998 at 06:31:39, Jouni Uski wrote:
>
>>So far I haven't seen any statistical proof, that one program is better against
>>human than against comp (or reverse).
>
>It all comes back to the same thing.  We don't have enough comp-human games at
>slow time controls, compared to 60000+ comp-comp games played by SSDF, to make
>any kind of comparison.  So just because you haven't seen the proof, doesn't
>mean it's not true, and of course this also does not mean that it is true.


Here's one interesting bit of data..  during the month of July, and early
August, I had a pretty serious bug in crafty's eval function.  During this
time, crafty was not able to win even 1 of every 20 games against computers,
yet it was having the same 80% win ratio against the usual group of GM
challengers that it always has...  And it plays so many more games against
GM players than against computers that this went undetected for quite a
while...

The question is, why did this happen?  Obviously the eval bug was seriously
affecting its play, because I saw game after game where it would make a
move and see things fall apart, when playing a computer, but against
humans it didn't happen.  So clearly there is some significant difference
between playing a computer and a human.  My speculation is that the tactical
skill of a computer is so good that any little bit of bogus analysis will
eventually lead to problems, while against a human, mistakes deep in the
tree are not nearly as important as how the position is "preserved" through
the game...

The bug has been fixed, scores against computers are now much better, yet
against GM's it has not changed appreciably at all...



This page took 0 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.