Author: Martin Slowik
Date: 23:32:58 07/28/04
Go up one level in this thread
On July 28, 2004 at 23:59:41, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>In some (most?) cases the user is only interested in a subset of the engines >>abilities. If I use a chess program mainly for analysis and not for engine vs. >>engine tournaments, I'm definitely not interested in its learning abilities. >>Instead I want to know how it compares in fresh situations, in positions >>probably never seen before. > >That's short-sighted. IE when you analyze, you often back up, try different >moves, to see what is going on. Position learning is a great help there to use >that information from earlier searches to help with later searches to make them >more accurate. I don't think that's short-sighted, maybe we just speak about different things. It's true, one goes back and forth in the various lines one sees and it's sometimes surprising to watch some engines "learning" the evals during the process. Very good at that task seems to be Yace in my experience, especially in endgames. You can get very high mate announcements that way, for example. I thought this is not "position learning" as it is implemented into most engines - if you start the program next day, it of course has already forgotten everything and you have to start going through your analysis all over again. Nothing has been stored on the hard disc. But I'm not a progammer and perhaps this is a somewhat skewed picture of the truth. > The SSDF and most other rating lists unfortunately >>don't answer that question. > >No, but then engines are not designed to answer that particular question very >accurately. They are designed to play chess from one side of the board, not >behave like a neutral observer and give zero-sum analysis from either side. >They do OK at that, but not as well as they play real games. Yes, of course, no disagreement here. Twas just a thought about the usual use of chess programs. There are certainly many people playing eng vs. eng tournaments and watching the results. For those people it's a kind of sporting event and the engine designs (including book learning etc.) are on par with it, no doubt. On the other hand there is certainly a large population of people who use their program mostly for analysis of their own or of other people games. I was just wondering if the programmers (particularly of the commercial programs) have forgotten those. But it also may be that "doing OK at that task" is enough for most of those users.
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