Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Book/No-book more data from a longer run

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 13:29:00 02/21/05

Go up one level in this thread


On February 21, 2005 at 15:15:49, Tord Romstad wrote:

>Hi Dann!
>
>On February 21, 2005 at 13:40:37, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>This is on the 2.2 GHz 64 bit computer (which had fewer problems than the slower
>>machine).  The first set is the raw data, and the second set has had all
>>duplicate games removed.
>>
>>  Program                    Elo    +   -   Games   Score   Av.Op.  Draws
>>1 Polyglot fruit-book      : 2553   31  35   372    59.9 %   2483   18.3 %
>>2 Polyglot glaurung-book   : 2540   32  35   372    57.5 %   2487   16.7 %
>>3 Polyglot glaurung-no-book: 2481   32  34   372    46.2 %   2507   16.7 %
>>4 Polyglot fruit-no-book   : 2427   40  29   372    36.3 %   2525   14.0 %
>>
>>  Program                    Elo    +   -   Games   Score   Av.Op.  Draws
>>1 Polyglot fruit-book      : 2550   32  37   348    59.3 %   2484   17.5 %
>>2 Polyglot glaurung-book   : 2536   33  35   363    56.7 %   2489   16.5 %
>>3 Polyglot glaurung-no-book: 2483   33  36   343    46.9 %   2505   16.9 %
>>4 Polyglot fruit-no-book   : 2430   41  30   354    36.9 %   2524   12.7 %
>>
>>It seems that Fruit may benefit from a book slightly more than glaurung.
>
>This is a big surprise to me.  Glaurung has a very primitive development
>eval, and no mobility at all except some very simple stuff for bishops.  I
>thought it would be completely unable to find good opening moves on
>its own.
>
>Perhaps the explanation simply is that stronger engines tend to profit
>more from playing with a book, as Sandro has suggested.

That is highly counter-intuitive to me.
I can understand that strong engines would not be as likely to "get lost" when
playing gambits and things of that nature, but they do not have as much headroom
to benefit from.

Consider an engine that plays 1000 Elo.  Give it a book 100 ply deep with no
errors and all moves of top engine SSDF or SuperGM quality.

Give the same book to Shredder.

I cannot imagine how Shredder will benefit more.

I think (paradoxically) that the opposite is more logical to me.  For instance,
the books that the professional programs have will be realistically many orders
of magnitude better than the auto-generated sort that I can produce.  And so if
they get a 100 Elo boost, I imagine that a weaker program will get far more from
it because they would have played stupid moves early on.

>It could also
>be related to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two programs.
>When I run test matches between Fruit and Glaurung, I have noticed that
>the Glaurung's scores most of its wins in the middle game, while Fruit
>tends to win most endgames.  Perhaps playing without a book reduces
>Fruit's chances of reaching the endgame.

I also find it surprising, since Fruit has a very sophisicated mobility
calculation.

>Thanks for doing this experiment, and for your nice choice of engines
>for the experiment!  :-)

I prefer open source engines for my tests (if possible).  This test required UCI
because I was also interested in testing the Polyglot book feature at the same
time.



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.