Author: Charles Worthington
Date: 08:30:08 04/28/03
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That's an interesting question but I have one of my own. Is not the engine's choice of continuations based soley on its eval of the line? Many times I have seen Shredder follow its over optimistic evals to a dead draw as white. I would rather my program know where it really stands and whether or not it has realistic winning chances. Also...I personally would like to know where it stands as well. There is nothing quite so frustrating as to have an over optimistic eval turn on you and bite you. I have seen numerous situations where The King has an eval of +2 against Deep Fritz's -1 and it RARELY works out in The Kings favor. It's hard for me to muster faith in an engine that is clueless about it's own position and it is the one thing that keeps me from giving Shredder a fair shot at becoming my main engine. Enough times of seeing Fritz pull the rug out from under my Shredder eval has spooked me I guess. I just do not see how it is possible to handle a position properly when you cannot even eval it properly and in fast blitz time controls (3+2), I might also add that the "optimistic" engines almost always perform more poorly than the well balanced engines. The truth seems to perform better than the lie in this case. Of course this discussion is about self-inflicted optimism by tampering with the parameters so it seems even more extreme. You are taking an already-optimistic engine and furthering it's optimism. It would likely take many thousands of games to come to a conclusion as to which works best. Honestly though, I think that in this case having your program lie to you (and itself) will not prove beneficial. The program will play better if it has a full understanding of its actual chances and not imagined ones...Optimism causes the program to overestimate it's chances and play far too aggressively (ie. unwarranted sacrifices) in certain positions where caution is warranted. Against a human this may prove beneficial but against a program firmly grounded in reality it may prove fatal. So, like in life, I think the truth has to be better than the lie. And I think that extensive testing of these settings would show that, more often than not, the lie would come back to bite you. Sincerely, Charles
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