Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: The Brick Wall

Author: Jon Dart

Date: 14:28:47 09/19/04

Go up one level in this thread


On September 19, 2004 at 15:18:47, Andrew Williams wrote:

>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.

Test suites have some value. I'd add, that few programs are bug free. Finding
and fixing bugs is beneficial over the long run, even if in the short run such
fixes sometimes actually hurt performance. It is easy to have code that plays
legal chess and even wins games and still have it do horrible wrong things
internally--buffer overruns, memory corruption, you name it. That's why Arasan
has ridiculous amounts of optional debugging and assert checking code. I also
use Bounds Checker.

--Jon




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.