Author: Andrew Williams
Date: 12:18:47 09/19/04
Go up one level in this thread
On September 19, 2004 at 14:21:30, Uri Blass wrote: >On September 19, 2004 at 12:54:57, Andrew Williams wrote: > >>On September 19, 2004 at 11:10:14, Stuart Cracraft wrote: >> >>>Hi -- I am looking for 2 or 3 beta testers who would receive >>>(full) source code to my program and in return would provide >>>input and comments about improving the search. They would >>>simply agree not to redistribute it and in fact discard it after >>>a week or two of looking at it (and commenting.) The program is in C, >>>5000 lines. The search and quiescence routines are 600 lines total. >>> >>>The reason I am considering this is due to hitting a brick wall at 249/300 >>>on WAC for several weeks now and knowing there are things I just cannot >>>find or go further with. The above score is at 1 second per position on a >>>1ghz P3 with a small transposition table. I am told that 270-300 is considered >>>"good" for this time control on this test. On this same machine >>>at the same time setting, with WAC, Crafty gets 270/300. >>> >> >>It strikes me that comparing your program with crafty (or any other program for >>that matter) based on 1 second searches in WAC is a bit weird. And a waste of >>time. I'm pretty sure, for example, that my program would do worse at WAC 1 >>second searches than yours on that hardware and I certainly don't care either >>way. > >Did you test it. >If not how can you be sure about it? > >Without testing my guess based on the level of your program is that you do >better than 250 solutions in WAC at 1 second per move on stuart Hardware >because I expect every program that is at the level of postmodernist to do it. > To be honest, it was a wild guess. PM gets 269 right in 1 second on my AMD 64 3200. Probably you're right and I was wrong to say "pretty sure". But it doesn't matter at all. >Crafty is not relatively strong in tactics of short searches and there are a lot >of weaker programs who do better than it. > >If a program does significantly worse than Crafty in WAC at 1 second per move >then there is a lot to improve in it's search. > That may be true, but I would reiterate that looking at its performance in WAC is not going to help Stuart much in improving it. I don't even think it will help much in improving its performance on other tactical tests, but that is just a guess. I would strongly re-state my point: to learn what is wrong with a chess program, it is better to play games than to test over and over on a test suite. Even testing over and over on several test suites is not a good idea, in my opinion. Andrew
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