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Subject: Re: Adaptability of Engine to Human Opponent's Style

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:17:34 09/03/98

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On September 03, 1998 at 10:16:45, Robert Henry Durrett wrote:

>Serge Desmarais on September 02, 1998 at 23:32:33 remarked:
>
>"For me, the best computer and/or program would be the one that could adapt
>itself to it's opponent's style and the evolution of that style!"
>
>Under the general banner of ADAPTIVE chess software, this is another idea
>regarding the type and purpose for adaptation.
>
>To what extent do existing engines do this?
>
>If uncommon, or not done at all, how easy would it be to modify existing chess
>engine programs so that would do what Serge Desmarais is suggesting here?  Is
>this feasible?


It would be difficult...  there are two possible ways to address this:

1.  opening book.  It is certainly possible to maintain a "player profile" and
keep up with what types of openings he/she likes/does well with, and when
playing that person, trying to avoid that type of book opening.  It could be
taken further to play gambits against people that like closed positions, and
vice-versa...  I once thought of doing this but have not yet gotten around to
it.  But on ICC it would probably be worth a rating boost to do so, because of
the wide variety of people Crafty plays there.

2.  engine.  Tuning this to an opponent would be more difficult.  It is
certainly possible to create several "personalities" (ie Deep Blue apparently
had a couple of "good configurations" and switched during the Kasparov match
to keep him off-balance) that behave differently...  and then choose from these
"personalities" based on the opponent's results...  try a personality and if he
does well against it, move on, if not, stick with that one as it seems to fit
his weaknesses..

However, when you think about it, a commercial chess engine isn't designed to
be used like I use Crafty.  They are really "one-user" programs for the most
part, sitting on your PC and playing you whenever you want.  And you can tune
them better than they can tune themselves (ie the various CM5xxx settings that
float around) to give you the type of game *you* want to train against.  In my
case, I am not a "single-user" type author, because most of my work is done in
the chess server environment...



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