Author: Don Dailey
Date: 21:29:22 09/08/98
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On September 08, 1998 at 19:16:58, Robert Henry Durrett wrote: >On September 08, 1998 at 12:24:07, Don Dailey wrote: > ><snip> > >>I think it is still fundamentally superior to the other programs. It >>may not actually be the very strongest currently, but this may be because >>Richard has not made any substantial effort to stay ahead and I also >>don't think the book is engineered as well as the top contenders, which >>could be a big part of the reason his program is not dominant right >>at the moment. >> >>- Don > >Your observation that you don't think "the book is engineered as well as the top >contenders" sounds like an interesting concept. I get the impression that >playing Genius with the Fritz book would not completely null out the Fritz >advantage because, I assume, the Fritz book is "engineered" for Fritz. I >presume that this means that the Fritz book lines are selected to optimize Fritz >performance by covering up specific weaknesses of Fritz and capitalizing on >specific strengths of Fritz. If this were so, then forcing Genius to use the >Fritz book would not be optimum for Genius because Genius's specific weaknesses >and strengths might be different from those of Fritz. > >If the above is an accurate portraial of what you meant by the book being >"engineered," then forcing Fritz to play with the Genius book would be equally >non-ideal. > >I wonder if a match between Genius and Fritz, with Fritz being forced to use the >Genius book would result in more equality in the win/loss/draw results of such a >match. In other words, if the problem were primarily one of book engineering, >such a match would point this out. > >Am I anywhere near close to what you were thinking? The way I would do it is to play 200 games at least with 100 different openings that were fairly shallow. Each program gets to ply BOTH sides of every opening. I have 200 openings that I use for self testing when I use self testing. This allows me to play 400 game matches. It is the way I attempt to isolate the opening book from the engine and also I like testing this way so that I tend to not optimize the program for some narrow set of openings but instead get to see just about every characteristic opening setup. I believe genius will benefit more than most programs from this procedure but there are probably others who will say just the opposite. In my opinion Genius knows more about positional play and is a jack of all trades in the sense that you won't easily catch it in some position it knows nothing about. The endgames are this way too. It always seems to have just the specific knowledge it would need to play the position correctly. There was obviously a lot of knowledge coded into Genius. When it comes to the endgame, I would bet Genius is the best. It may not be quite as good overall as the best programs even with a neutral book, but I really doubt it is far behind. Naturally this is open to debate and I'm sure many will question this. - Don
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