Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:48:50 06/02/04
Go up one level in this thread
On June 02, 2004 at 12:30:50, Sune Fischer wrote: >On June 02, 2004 at 11:49:48, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>>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. > >Ok that is your privilege, but take Mr. Smith here he is a very strong player >and in the need for good engine to help him analyse his games. > >Mr. Smith has never heard of the computer chess club and couldn't care less >about computer games. All Mr. Smith needs is an engine that will assist him in >his analysis. > >As it happens Mr. Smith asks me for advice, now, should I tell him that Crafty >can't do analysis because Crafty is a "chess playing system" and he _must_ do >analysis with ponder ON (whatever in the world that means) and he must enable >learning before beginning analysis (whatever effect that would have?)? Learning has no affect in analysis mode. ponder=on is fine becausee it also has no effect. IE crafty is designed sensibly and doesn't need the operator to say "you are analyzing a game so you can't ponder anything." It already knows that. It also knows that learning makes no sense when analyzing and it doesn't do that either... As I said, it is designed to be run "as is" and it does just fine that way, the operator does _not_ have to twiddle with anything. Annotating games? No problem. No learning or pondering required. No change to their settings required either as the program is written to do this stuff correctly. > >I guess I have to recommend some other engine to him, I don't want him to misuse >Crafty for something it wasn't intended to do of course! Those are your strange and twisted ideas, not what actually happens. I wrote crafty so that the user doesn't _have_ to change anything. Use it to play chess against him, use it to analyze games, use it to annotate games to find blunders or errors, etc. It does _all_ of that perfectly well with _no_ operator fiddling required. > > >>>There are problems with determanistic behavior of the engines. >> >>And there are problems with non-deterministic behavior of books. > >Which is why I do nunn based tests, but that's a different story for some other >time. > That is ok to test _your_ engine. It isn't ok for testing mine, because I have certain types of openings in mind when I tune my evaluation. You can force crafty to play odd positions if all you care about is seeing how you do against it, but it doesn't represent anything meaningful about how _crafty_ plays... I have said that before. If you want to test against Crafty with learn=off and no book whatsoever, that is perfectly fine. But your result, whatever it is, won't be against "Crafty" it will be against Crafty* [*=modified non-optimal settings version] only. If all you want to do is measure the effect of changes on your engine, that makes perfect sense to do it. But if you are a third-party playing a basement match or tournament, it does _not_ make sense to change anything. >> >>> >>>>Why not play with a >>>>common (bad) book? >>> >>>Done often. >> >> >>And just as worthless of course, > >Not "just" as worthless, it's a little less worthless. A step in the right >direction if you will. If the goal is north, and you step south, perhaps not. > >>>> 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... > >I have found many bugs due to a lot of helpful tournament holders, so that's >just outright false. If they report bugs to you, fine. Same thing happens to me. But if they report something and then add "By the way, learning was off, pondering was off, etc" then I skip the rest and continue working... > >>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. > >What should Mr. Smith do about that? > Absolutely _nothing_. Play crafty "as is". That is what I said all along. >-S.
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