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Subject: Re: Anti-human programs as completely separate entities

Author: Roy Eassa

Date: 12:33:11 10/11/02

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On October 11, 2002 at 15:14:55, Matthew Hull wrote:

>On October 11, 2002 at 15:00:05, Roy Eassa wrote:
>
>>I have very gradually come around to the idea that what makes a chess computer
>>good against other chess computers may be quite different from what makes it
>>good against strong human chessplayers.
>>
>>Some years ago, PCs were slow enough that the chess author had no choice but to
>>write the program to maximize the search, or else even moderately strong humans
>>could win simply by tactics.  But I think now, with PCs over 2 GHz, just 25% of
>>the computer's power is more than sufficient tactically against humans.  Against
>>other computers, every ounce of speed must be used to search deeper, as in Fritz
>>or Ruffian.  But against humans perhaps the great majority of the power of the
>>CPU needs to be used exclusively to play anti-human chess: avoid locked
>>positions, avoid allowing certain types of attacking formations, "understand"
>>many, many types of positions better, etc.  Such a program would likely perform
>>very poorly against the likes of Fritz but could perform much better than Fritz
>>does against top humans.
>>
>>My thought: there should be two totally different classes of chess programs:
>>those that are designed to win against other programs and those that are
>>designed to win against humans.  And if you want to create a program that claims
>>to do both, you should have it swap in a completely different set of algorithms
>>-- and not just change a few settings -- depending upon the opponent (human or
>>computer).
>
>I believe Crafty has some internal lists of opponents which the user can supply
>that can be compared to the opponent name supplied by Xboard.  The program will
>adjust it's play if the opponent is on the GM list or the B(locker) list, or the
>C(computer) list.


But my point was that adjusting its play is not enough.  More like throwing out
90% of the software and loading a completely different program (except for the
WinBoard communication part).



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