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Subject: Re: Symbolic: The TNS (Thousand Node Search)

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 04:18:13 02/17/04

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On February 16, 2004 at 17:11:57, martin fierz wrote:

>i believe it's fundamentally wrong to force computers into some human
>straight-jacket. we have our capacities, the computers have theirs. nobody in
>his right mind would attempt to emulate the human thought process on a computer
>when trying to add up two numbers.
>limiting yourself to 1000 nodes for a search, just because humans are limited to
>that seems like limiting yourself to e.g. computing one digit per second in an
>addition - and then claiming that that is better than doing it in a nanosecond
>:-)

I am not sure I agree.  It all depends on what your goals are.  If your goal
is to get a better understanding of how the human brain works when playing a
game of chess, it definitely makes sense not to search more nodes than a human
player would have been able to search in a reasonable amount of time.

If your goal is to create the strongest possible program, the situation
is of course entirely different.  But even in this case, it is not
impossible that knowledge gained by studying how the human brain works
could somehow be useful.

I don't think a chess program emulating human thought processes will be
competitive any time in the near future (I hope I am wrong, though), but
I think there is some hope of making a hybrid approach work.  One of my
long-term plans (the phrase "long-term plans" is a bit ridiculous here,
because my long-term plans tend to change a couple of times every day)
is to write a very slow and highly selective engine with lots of chess
knowledge, and let it use one or more fast and stupid "sub-engines" to
help it do move selection and tactical verification.  The idea is to
emulate a human player using a computer program to analyze.

Tord



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