Author: Eelco de Groot
Date: 17:00:21 10/13/03
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I think that all sounds logical, Russell. But just thinking about it right now as just an interested person I also agree with Uri that chessprograms do not approach perfect or solved play at long or very long timecontrols. My opinion: chess is far from solved and tactics still play a role even if you have many days for a move. Not in every game of course, but if thirtynine games ended in perfect draws -in 2020?- it will now be that one extremely hard to find move in game forty that decides who wins the match. So in a way tactics becomes even more important when random errors and imperfect heuristics causing the occasional brilliant moves but also blunders, become obsolete and are replaced with almost perfect calculations. To put it in extremes for Vincent: "Positional heuristics are not necessary if you can calculate beans perfectly and very deep" Going towards the other end of the scale, short timecontrols, I think you may be very right about the relative weaknesses becoming skewed. At least it sounds right. Every computation you want to do that does not scale with search depth -or with the number of nodes searched-, will have a different influence in shorter or longer timecontrols. I you do a calculation of a fixed iterval, say a second, at every root, it will hurt in extremely fast blitz. Another practical problem; at long timecontrols the search might become unstable and you haven't tested that enough. Or some unforeseen overflow may occur, or the maximum number of halfmoves is set at 64 to save memory or control extensions but causes the search to stop too soon at very large plydepths (theoretically). And there are other things to consider too that make Christophe's theory more complex: the "ideal" search tree may in theory look like a fractal at any size (that's how I imagine it in my mind) but for a very large tree the endnodes will be more often in a next stage of the game, if the root is in the middlegame the leaves will be in the endgame etc. As a non-chessprogrammer I imagine that may make a difference in the way you search the larger tree even if the general pattern of the search stays the same. (Computer-)chess is complex! Regards,Eelco
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