Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 14:18:56 12/18/02
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On December 18, 2002 at 16:20:16, Robert Hyatt wrote: >That's not what I was talking about. There are two ways you can compare >two chess algorithms, logically. > >1. time until it finds the solution move with the right score. > >2. time until it completes a particular search depth. > >If you are playing with search extensions (or de-extensions in the case of >null-move) 2 has an obvious problem. Because search depths don't mean much >when you are trying to find a move. > >If you are playing with search extensions or whatever, it is possible to >greatly change the shape of the search tree, so that time to solution looks >good, but time to depth looks bad, or vice-versa. I don't consider this case. To make sure that I understand what you're talking about, it sounds like this case is when the thing finds the answer, but then goes to hell and locks up. You can take a less pathological case and demonstrate that this can be normal. If you find an answer in ply 9, you will have resolved the PV twice, which takes time. If you don't find the answer in ply 9, the solution move will have failed low, which typically takes less time. Personally, I'd rather have ply 9 take longer to complete, if it gets me the best score. So I don't look at time taken to finish the ply. I'm interested in time taken to find the move and hold it, regardles of anything else that happens, because that's what happens in a game. I try to avoid the problem of finding a few solutions for bad reasons by doing a lot of tests. If version A gets 30 more of them than version B, that's pretty strongly indicative. But this doesn't address the problem I pointed out with Omid's thing: A takes 30 seconds, produces 50 answers. B takes 40 seconds, produces 55 answers. It makes absolutely no sense to say that B is better than A, and if the time differential is large enough, and the difference in number of solutions is small enough, it may make sense to say the reverse. >I'm personally not convinced there is _any_ way to _really_ compare two >algorithms except to play them in a long match. Tactically stronger != >stronger overall, in all cases. Tactically weaker != weaker overall, in >all cases. There are lots of problems with this, too. >I think that for times, _both_ approaches are needed. measuring the time >until the correct PV pops out has problems, as does searching to a fixed depth. >Unless you simply search to the depth required to find the solution, with each >algorithm. And even that is not so easy to compare. Doing a search to fixed depth only make sense if you are trying to test pure performance modifications, which at most obvious are algorithm improvements that do not change the shape of the tree, but perhaps you can extend this to include changes that affect the order in which the tree is searched (move ordering issues). To test tactical changes this way is crazy. bruce >You can compare node counts. Search times to find a solution, or search times >to search to a specific depth. All three reveal different things about the >program... relying on one is not something I do. I try to look at them all >to get a better overall picture of what is happening...
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