Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 08:49:48 06/02/04
Go up one level in this thread
On June 02, 2004 at 03:46:27, Sune Fischer wrote: >On June 01, 2004 at 18:50:22, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>Please. >> >>I had a choice: (1) continue the hand-tuned book approach I used in the Cray >>Blitz days; (2) develop an alternative. >> >>I simply chose (2) because I wanted to see what was possible. Now you want to >>punish any program that uses (2) but let the ones that use (1) continue to enjoy >>they hand-prepared book. > >I don't want to punish anybody, I do however want to allow the user to do as he >pleases without hearing me complain. > >At the point of release we relinquish all control of the engine. >Expect the settings to be altered, expect the engine to play in all sort of >weird environments. > >Don't complain about it saying that's not how it meant to be played. >If you won't acknowledge that the user is boss at his end then don't release the >engine to him. That's a completely nonsensical approach to anything. I designed Crafty with one goal in mind, playing chess. Crafty is a "package". Its book. Its learning. Its search. Its evaluation. Its pondering. Breaking any of those makes little sense since it becomes "not crafty" at that instant. > >>It makes absolutely no sense. Why not play without books? > >There are problems with determanistic behavior of the engines. And there are problems with non-deterministic behavior of books. > >>Why not play with a >>common (bad) book? > >Done often. And just as worthless of course, unless you are trying to determine where your engine does well or poorly against a specific program. But the result won't say one thing about how you will do when you play the _real_ program in an important game... > >> But certainly don't play with a book hand-tuned to program A >>and program B might well do poorly with it. > >Why not, it might help you locate weaknesses. A person playing a basement tournament is not trying to fix weaknesses. That is where this thread started. Not on author testing, which is a different thing entirely... > >>The only viable choice is "hands off". Let the program have the best >>opportunity to choose book lines by itself. That is the very essence of >>computer chess anyway, _fully_ self-contained chess playing. > >That's certainly an interesting configuration. >Does that mean all other configurations are worthless? No! Fine. Go drive your car with 3 wheels mounted. Report back. I'm sure everyone is _really_ interested in that result. Let's make it the left front wheel for simplicity. Compare your top speed to a 3 cylinder Geo Metro. Then lets have a real race to see how well your testing worked. > > >>>I'm afraid that's just the way it is, I do the things I find interesting and >>>funny to do. If people download it and turn it off as the first thing, well >>>it's none of my business. >> >>No, but I can make that as impossible for Crafty as it is for programs that >>don't have it in the first place... > >If you make it impossible I think Crafty will be kicked out of a lot of >tournaments. >People want to control the engine, if they can't the engine becomes less >valuable to them. If turning off learning gets it kicked out, that's fine by me. I didn't write it to participate in oddball-configured basement events. I wrote it as a stand-alone system to play chess. > >-S.
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