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

Author: Ed Schröder

Date: 15:17:50 09/01/98

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>>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...

I can report a similar case on the last Aegon 1997. A pre-version of Rebel9
had a horrible deep bug (detected after the tournament when I suddenly got
worse comp-comp results). Still this version gained a rating of 2619, scored
4.5 out of 6 playing against 4 x IM and 2 x GM.

Looks pretty convincing to me that comp-comp is a different story the Man
vs Machine.

- Ed -



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