Author: Andrew Williams
Date: 14:49:09 09/19/04
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On September 19, 2004 at 17:28:47, Jon Dart wrote: >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. > I'd certainly agree about the use of asserts (PM should have more and I should enable them more often in testing) and Bounds checking (I use valgrind, which is fantastic). I think of those things as finding bugs, rather than improving my program as such. So I wouldn't be looking at how many solutions I got, so much as whether any asserts failed or valgrind saw some problem. I *do* use test sets sometimes (and I like your Arasan suites a lot), but it's more for my amusement than because I think I'm going to learn anything particularly interesting. Perhaps I'm just using them wrong... Andrew
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