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Subject: Re: The Brick Wall

Author: Scott Gasch

Date: 09:55:07 09/20/04

Go up one level in this thread


Case in point: a couple of years ago someone posted scores from the pros on
ECM/10.  Almost all of them were around 700/879 except one notable (to me)
exception: Shredder was down around 640.  (Note: I'm working from memory here
and I don't know what hardware was involved).  But Shredder is definitely a very
strong engine, probably one of the strongest engines out there.

If you look at test suite results (which I do to a point, because it's a more
reliable metric than "I think the engine played well today") you'll notice some
percentage of "solved" positions where picked because of luck.  The engine
didn't see the deep mate / tactic, it just liked the bishop on that square.
Tweak your eval a little and suddenly you "lose" 10 solutions.  Did you really
lose anything?  Probably not.

The real question is how to emperically measure chess engine progress...
self-play?  Automated tournament vs. other opponent?  Test suite results?  ICC
rating?  I don't have an answer but I do self-play and test suites, personally.
And I don't put a whole lot of faith in the suites...

Scott



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