Author: Amir Ban
Date: 12:17:32 04/29/03
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On April 28, 2003 at 11:30:08, Charles Worthington wrote: >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. > I agree. I believe overvaluation is the most common reason for engine losses. It's much more common than undervaluation, a less fatal problem. This is especially true in tactical situations, where the program with overvaluation seems not to see tactics, because its search is meaningless. Amir
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