Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 10:19:38 02/15/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 15, 2004 at 10:03:22, Uri Blass wrote: >On February 15, 2004 at 08:53:42, martin fierz wrote: > >>On February 14, 2004 at 13:16:15, Christophe Theron wrote: >> >>[snip] >> >>>What I have always tried to do is to hide the details of what's inside Chess >>>Tiger (in order to protect my work a little bit) but still explain what my >>>methodology (or work philosophy) was (in order to somehow give back to the >>>community). >>> >>>I think it's important to have strong guidelines in your work. Some of them come >>>from your knowledge of information processing in general (be careful not to >>>create bugs, don't waste resources, never trust Microsoft...), and some of them >>>are specific to the domain of chess programming and took me years to figure out. >>>For example: >>>* don't compute something in advance if you are not sure you will use it, >>>because chances are that you will get a cutoff before you need it (remember it's >>>just a guideline - sometimes you can break this rule). >>>* you need a very accurate way of measuring progress, or you will not make >>>progress at all. >>>* Any change can make your program significantly weaker. You need to test your >>>changes (with the method you have built) very often. >>>* People believe that chess is about evaluation, but actually it's all about >>>search (I'm trying very hard to break this rule, because it must be wrong from a >>>mathematical point of view, but it's really difficult). >> >>i'm not sure i agree with this one - but then i don't quite know what you mean >>with that sentence :-) >>my disagreement comes from the fact that improving your eval automatically >>improves your search when you use any kind of pruning which depends on the >>evaluation. nullmove is such an example, but this is a general observation which >>works for other kinds of pruning decisions like futility pruning too. if you >>evaluate better, you have a greater chance of searching/extending important >>lines and pruning the irrelevant lines. >> >>but perhaps you meant something different?! >> >>cheers >> martin > >I think that christophe meant that based on his experience changes in search >rules gave him bigger improvement than changes in evaluation. > >Uri It's based on my experience and the opinion of other people as well (including chess players). Christophe
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.