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Subject: Re: The Brick Wall

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 16:28:28 09/19/04

Go up one level in this thread


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

>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.

Ahh, but you may have forgotten: I am a *very* weak player.

That would be like Fide Master David Gliksman advising Gary Ksaparov.

Doesn't make sense. In fact, the difference in rating points is probably
similar.

I am likely around 1400 and my program is already showing over master
the IQ test... so this just doesn't make sense.

I can understand test results. Throw me a position and I drown.

Stuart



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