Author: Matthew Hull
Date: 12:52:07 10/11/02
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On October 11, 2002 at 15:33:11, Roy Eassa wrote: >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). It's not clear to me that you need to toss 90%, if the program had built-in flexibility to adopt different styles of play.
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