Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Validating the Nunn positions

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 12:47:56 01/08/03

Go up one level in this thread


On January 08, 2003 at 15:40:21, Rajen Gupta wrote:

>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;

In theory they can do it but I doubt if they practically do it when 99% of the
tournaments are not done from the nunn positions.

Uri



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.