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Subject: Re: learning by playing against yourself

Author: Jay Scott

Date: 11:21:31 01/04/99

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On January 04, 1999 at 12:03:57, blass uri wrote:
>I read that in backgammon the best program learned by playing against itself.
>
>Did someone try it in chess and what were the results?

Yes. It doesn't work as well in chess. An issue that is not important
in games between naive programs, as they are learning, won't be learned.
If the program is not smart enough to notice that, say, attacking an
isolated pawn ties down the enemy forces to defense, and recognize that
that makes a difference, then it won't learn to avoid weak pawns.
That's an example of an important but subtle idea that a program might
have trouble learning by self-play.

One idea about why it works so well in backgammon is that the
in backgammon the dice force a self-play program to explore all the
important parts of the game space. In chess, a learning program can make
the same mistakes over and over and never correct them because it doesn't
know how to punish them.

Machine Learning in Games:
http://forum.swarthmore.edu/~jay/learn-game/index.html

  Jay



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