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Subject: Re: The biggest failure of all times

Author: Daniel Clausen

Date: 05:17:12 10/08/03

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On October 08, 2003 at 07:37:03, Dan Andersson wrote:

>One can also argue about how knowledge based the approach was. As I remember it
>I was less than impressed of the game specific insights while reading it.

Surely you can argue about that. And for different persons will be more/less
impressed when reading it. Before I read the paper, I didn't know a lot of
positional knowledge about the game (apart from building up threats on the right
rows) and was impressed how many positions turned into trivial positions once
you know a little bit more about the game. :) Most people think there's nothing
positional about it but just pure luck/calculation, which in essense even is
true. :)

I think there are two big reasons, why there's this knowledge about ConnectFour
which allows you to solve the game, but there's no such knowledge yet about
chess.

(1)
Zugzwang plays a central point in ConnectFour. A lot of positions change their
game-theoretical value (+1, 0, -1) when side-to-move is flipped. I'm not sure
how high the percentage in a more or less equal ending in chess is, that the
result depends on zugzwang. I would be interesting to calculate that for known
endings. I assume it's very high when it comes to pawn-endgames, but also higher
than what most people think when it's not a pawn-endgame.

(2)
Each move in ConnectFour goes towards the sure end of the game. You can't do
loops (with move reperition) like in chess. I guess that (together with
non-scientific rules like 50-move rules) makes it much harder to find general
patterns for chess. (and with these pattern I don't mean the patterns your
average chess engines uses for their evaluation, but patterns which really help
you to _solve_ the game)


> I had more use of Breukers Memory versus Search Ph. D. thesis.

The name rings a bell but I'm not sure I've read it. Is it publically available
on the net?

Sargon



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