Author: martin fierz
Date: 00:23:12 08/06/03
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On August 05, 2003 at 12:37:52, Keith Evans wrote: >On August 05, 2003 at 03:42:56, martin fierz wrote: > >>On August 04, 2003 at 14:55:07, Keith Evans wrote: >> >>>A page describing it is at: >>> >>>http://www.digenetics.com/products/chess/about.htm >>> >>>They seem to imply a connection with Fogel's work on checkers which is described >>>in the book "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI." Is this really true, or is >>>this more about grafting something like the Microsoft paperclip onto a chess >>>program? I don't know too much about checkers, so maybe Fogel's work doesn't >>>even amount to much as far as playing strength goes. (I just got that book as a >>>present and haven't read it yet.) >> >>the checkers program "blondie24" is very weak compared to any decent checkers >>program out there. the book is an interesting read and all that, but the thing >>really can't play checkers! i'd be surprised if it was any different with >>chess... >> >>cheers >> martin > >How much knowledge would you need to add to a checkers program for it to match >the strength of blondie24? And roughly how long would it take to add that >knowledge? Is it one day's work? (I haven't read the book, but I assume that >Fogel was just addressing the evaluation function.) > >Thanks, >Keith fogel & co used a plain alpha-beta search IIRC, and did the eval with a neural network which self-tuned itself. they report one (IMO faulty) experiment in the book which is a comparison of their program with one which has a material-only eval, their program coming out on top (as was to be expected...). the fault in the experiment is that their search engine is very slow. if your eval is VERY VERY slow as theirs is, that doesn't matter since your speed is limited by the eval. if your eval is very fast (material only), then the slow search is a serious problem. if they had a decent search, then their neural-network version would search to the same depth but the material-only version would search much deeper. i don't own the final version of blondie24, i just looked at the games given in the book. my own checkers program thinks those games are full of errors. i assume that if you give me one hour to write an evaluation function, my program would beat blondie24 easily. cheers martin
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