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Subject: Re: EPD tests a little leaky...

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 09:53:32 02/10/99

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On February 10, 1999 at 04:25:00, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>On February 09, 1999 at 22:58:41, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>Mike Byrne over on r.g.c.c. just found two more (he found a total of five!)
>>negative checkmates in the first twenty rows from the rockpile.  No wonder they
>>are so hard to solve -- they have no solution. ;-)
>>
>>It is rather amazing how many of these problems have less than ideal answers.
>>
>>For quite some time people have been basing the strength of their computer
>>programs by running against batteries of these tests, as one measure of ELO.
>>
>>Maybe we need to look over the tests very carefully.  It could be that an 80%
>>score is 100% right and a 100% score is 20% wrong!
>>
>>Maybe you have thought -- darn it!   My program keeps getting the wrong answer
>>on this problem!
>>
>>OTOH, maybe your program was right all along.
>
>I don't understand what the suite is supposed to represent.  Some suites are
>presented as "hard problems", and I thought that is what this was.  But it seems
>like a lot of them are more like "broken problems", and all running the thing
>for an half-hour or so per position does is waste time.
Don't you think that finding out which positions are broken in the commonly
available test suites is valuable?  I have found errors in every test suite.
These test suites are used to judge the strength of your program.  The positions
that I posted were classified as "unsolved" because (up to that point) the
results were unknown.  By that I mean, I had already run them for a very long
time, and the proposed move was not chosen, and there is no result of mate for
either side.

I think that finding the right answers or discovering what is wrong with the
test problems is a lot more interesting than just finding an answer we already
know.

But I have an unusual bent, anyway.



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