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Subject: Automated Evaluation Learning

Author: Peter McKenzie

Date: 22:14:43 07/06/03


I'm interested in trying some automated evaluation tuning, is anyone else doing
this at the moment?  Interested in hearing about any successes or failures in
this area.

TD learning looks like the most obvious thing to start thinking about, the
following paper is a good introduction:

http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Lex.Weaver/pub_sem/publications/ICCA-98_equiv.pdf

Also, here is Dan Homan's pseudo code from a few years back:

http://fortuna.iasi.rdsnet.ro/ccc/ccc.php?art_id=117970


I'm not 100% convinced by TD learning, but it certainly looks interesting.

As I understand it TD learning basically uses the scores from the next few
positions to give a (hopefully) better estimate of the score for the current
position.  It then adjusts the eval weights so that the eval (or in the case of
TDLeaf, the eval of the position at the tip of the PV) moves towards the
estimate.

OK, technically it uses all the remaining positions in the game for its score
estimate, but in practice this is heavily weighted towards the next few
positions.  It's a pretty cool idea really.

One problem I see is that different features will be tuned at different rates.
Common features will of course be tuned quite quickly while rare features that
occur only occasionally will be tuned slowly.  This is to some extent
unavoidable but maybe it makes sense to slow the rate of change for weights of
common features before doing the same with rare features.  Possibly a minor
point though.

Peter



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