Author: Roy Eassa
Date: 12:59:01 10/11/02
Go up one level in this thread
On October 11, 2002 at 15:52:07, Matthew Hull wrote: >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. I'm not saying it's "clear" -- if it were clear, I'd have no reason to propose it as a new idea. :-) But the idea is a completely different approach because I don't think any of the existing anti-human techniques or attempts go nearly far enough to eliminate the weaknesses computers show against GMs. A few years ago they tried to make programs that took a completely different approach but back then the hardware was maybe 100 MHz and the programs played weak. Now the hardware is 20 times as fast and maybe those previously failed attempts would do a lot better today -- but only against humans! I know they would get slaughtered by programs like Fritz, Tiger, or Ruffian.
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