Author: Jay Scott
Date: 13:11:40 11/25/03
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I noticed years ago that computers make far fewer draws than humans. I think it's because humans are more afraid to lose than eager to win. It's a well-known human cognitive bias; see the classic 1974 Tversky and Kahneman paper "Judgement Under Uncertainty". Wimpy humans. Computers don't have that flaw, and always fight. Other possible explanations: - Programs are tuned to be aggressive, to win against humans and to play more entertaining games, at the cost of making more errors. - Humans understand drawing better. Humans have far more knowledge about when a position is drawn and how to draw it, whereas programs often calculate "I am 0.05 pawn better, I am still playing for a win." If the game of chess is a draw, then theoretically as players become close to optimal the number of losing mistakes per game should approach zero and most games will be drawn. Alas, we are still at the stage where the expected number of mistakes per game is greater than one. :-) My personal guess is that top play is still very far from game-theoretically optimal, witness the surprising discoveries made in endgame databases.
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