Author: Roberto Nerici
Date: 00:39:29 11/25/03
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On November 25, 2003 at 03:08:41, Daniel Clausen wrote: >On November 25, 2003 at 02:59:12, Mig Greengard wrote: > >>Having debated both sides of the issue in regard to man-machine play, I'm left >>wondering why opening books are used in computer-only competitions. > >Doesn't the whole idea simply fail because it would be almost impossible to >prove that a certain engine doesn't _still_ have a book internally? Limiting >program size etc fail in practice. The only thing that work would be to actually >have the source code of the engines and compile them right before the tournament >starts. But that fails due to commercial interests. > >Sargon I agree. It is similar to Mig's point that you can't tell a human player to not use a book; it is in his head. Similarly, even if you forbid a chess engine from having a huge opening book file, it could still have hard-coded moves in the engine. Even if it didn't have that, it could have very specific opening heuristics that effectively encode a set of openings algorithmically (which is what I believe some early chess systems did). I suppose there still remains the "what if" question, but pragmatically I don't think it would work. Roberto/.
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