Author: Steve Coladonato
Date: 13:37:44 07/16/04
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On July 16, 2004 at 12:47:09, Uri Blass wrote: >On July 16, 2004 at 07:08:52, Steve Coladonato wrote: > >>I tend to agree with you and have posted previously on this subject. The book >>is human not engine. You will see comments about the recent WCCC match and see >>where so and so had an inferior position out of book. >> >>I have suggested in the past that to truly test the engine, the books should be >>the same and even suggested a book depth of between 12 and 20 moves (24-40 ply). >> In the past, before Shredder was Chessbase, I felt that Stefan Meyer-Kahlen's >>algorithms or heuristics were a bit better than the competition (I haven't >>followed Shredder very much since it was acquired). >> >>Today, I believe the improvements in the performance of the engines is mainly >>attributed to the hardware not anything the programmers have done. > >I think that it is dependent on the programmer and you cannot generalize. > >There are programmers who do almost no progress in software and there are >programmers who get significant progress. > >programs that did significant progress in the last year are mainly weaker than >the commercial programs(Thinker,Fruit,Gothmog) but it is possible that at least >one of them may become better than the commercial programs in the near future. > >I am also not sure about progress of Shredder and Junior since the last version >and we will know better when the ssdf tests Shredder9 and Junior9. > >Uri Uri, I'm not suggesting that the programmers do not improve their code. What I am suggesting is that the evaluation of a position at a given ply depth for a given program is basically unchanged and that the improvement is coming from being able to see deeper. Given a restriction on the amount of time a program could analyze a position, with older hardware it may have only been able to get to 12 ply. Today, with newer hardware, it could probably get to 18 ply. And I have seen with every engine so far, that what it evaluates at 12 ply, say +1.7 at 18 ply this could easily be evaluted at -2.2. Consequently, the engines are picking better lines because it sees deeper. My earlier interest in Shredder was two fold. One, it was amateur. Two, SMK seemed to be doing something different in how he was evaluating positions. It's kind of hard for me to explain but I think that the evaluation algorithms and heuristics are basically the same (with a couple of exceptions) and the weight assigment is the biggest difference. Steve
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