Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 00:09:08 06/30/03
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On June 29, 2003 at 10:29:33, martin fierz wrote:
>On June 28, 2003 at 11:20:21, Frederic Louguet wrote:
>
>>I read an interesting paper from Albert Xin Jiang and Michael Buro about
>>Multi-ProbCut and its implementation in Crafty. I have always been very
>>skeptical about this pruning technique (for chess) but the paper is rather
>>optimistic. However, the data presented does not seem very convincing from a
>>statistical point of view (too few games, not enough opponents). So could Robert
>>Hyatt tell us a little more about the effectiveness of this technique ? Does it
>>_really_ work ?
>
>i can't really tell you anything about chess, but i tried multi-probcut (MPC) in
>my checkers program. the general opinion about checkers is that null-move is not
>a good idea there, so everybody uses his own hand-crafted pruning algorithm.
>therefore, MPC seemed like an interesting candidate for my program. MPC
>performed much better than no pruning, but also clearly worse than my (highly
>checkers-specific) own pruning. i ran matches with 300 games/match, so the
>results were statistically significant (i don't remember the numbers off-head).
>i don't see why MPC shouldn't work in chess if it works in other games like
>othello and checkers. whether it's better or worse than nullmove i have no idea.
>as a general observation, i find it hard to believe that any generic pruning
>algorithm (like MPC & nullmove are) could perform better than one which
>incorporates game-specific knowledge.
The fact that a pruning algorithm works in a certain game tells you that
obviously this algorithms incorporates game-specific knowledge.
In particular, the fact that null move works well in chess tells you a lot about
the essence of this game. At least it gives you an important information about
the game.
By searching, and finding, good pruning algorithms for a given game we improve
our knowledge of that game. The fact that a pruning algorithm works reveals
something about the game that maybe you did not know before.
Christophe
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