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Subject: Re: Validating the Nunn positions

Author: Rajen Gupta

Date: 12:40:21 01/08/03

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On January 08, 2003 at 15:18:18, Roger D Davis wrote:

>We occasionally see posts where engines take turns playing the Nunn positions,
>the idea being to give the engines an equal footing, but with some development.
>But has anyone looked at whether white or black wins more often for each Nunn
>position? Presumably, if white wins some 55% of the time for all openings (or
>whatever the figure it, consult your database), then the same should hold true
>for the Nunn positions: Given equal engines, white should win 55% of the time.
>
>Some large inequality between white or black would indicate that a particular
>position ought to be deleted from the set, or some other position substituted.
>
>Roger

i see the point that you are trying to make ie that there maybe some positions
that are not strictly neutral to begin with; however each engine gets an equal
bite at the cherry so to speak and even if a particular position were to
inherently favour one colour, both engines get to play that colour and the final
result depends upon which engine can win more often; so i guess the nunn
positions are a pretty good test for evaluating engines; however the valid
argument is that programmers can tune their engines to perfom well on these
tests;



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