Author: Uri Blass
Date: 00:11:41 02/28/03
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On February 27, 2003 at 20:23:39, Amir Ban wrote: >On February 26, 2003 at 18:48:53, Stephen Ham wrote: > >>Thanks, >> >>Dann, Uri, and Robin! I think I understood all of that. That was very helpful. >>Again, I'm know next to nothing about chess engine programing, so I assumed that >>the evaluation function guided the search function. I don't know why I assumend >>that...I just did. >> > >Of course the evaluation guides the search. Since you got here various answers >that basically say evaluation is not that important I will add a view that >strongly disagrees. Getting evaluation right is the most important thing for a >program to do in a position. Under-evaluation will often lead to playing weak >moves, but over-evaluation is almost always fatal against an opponent who has >the right assessment. > >Amir I have some comments here 1)Evaluation is not only to be more correct in score but to choose better moves. If you add to your evaluation a random small noise the result may be worse than if you add a constant. 2)I think that evaluation is one of the main things but it is not clear that it is more important than search. If you make the program 3 times faster thanks to better search rules(I mean something eqvivalence because I do not expect better search rules to give the same improvement in every position) then it is a big improvement(I believe that the potential is practically bigger). 3)If I understood correctly most of your work from Junior5 is about evaluation. It may be interesting to know if Junior8 can beat Junior5 with time odds of 3:1 (it is possible to say +200% for one engine in engine matches) I believe that it will be the case only if the time control is long enough but again I think that better search rules with the same evaluation may give exponential improvement when the time control is slower. 4)The problem is that practically you cannot seperate between the 2 and say that the evaluation gave you x elo and the search gave you y elo because it is possible that a change in the search rules is productive only thanks to better evaluation. Uri
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