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Subject: Re: EGTB access and playing strength

Author: Vasik Rajlich

Date: 16:23:54 01/29/06

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On January 29, 2006 at 10:45:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 29, 2006 at 09:52:57, Kurt Utzinger wrote:
>
>>On January 29, 2006 at 09:38:56, Majd Al-Ansari wrote:
>>
>>>I have a completely different result.  I see quite a big difference and many
>>>"won" games are now won instead of drawn.
>>
>>      Please be good enough to present those results
>>      here. This would be of great interest.
>>      Kurt
>>
>>I have checked out quite a few games
>>>and I will say that EGTB's greately improve endgame play for Rybka, and plug a
>>>lot of holes.
>>
>>      This is contrary to long experience with other engines
>>      where you can almost see no difference regarding overall
>>      score after playing some hundred games.
>>      Kurt
>>
>> EGTB are especially important if the other side has them.  Not
>>>having them will leak a lot of points.  Still there is quite a ways to go for
>>>Rybka when endgames are concerned.  It still plays some endings horribly.  But
>>>the gaps are getting smaller and smaller and I am very interested to see how
>>>Rybka will be with beta 14 (EG knowledge added).
>
>
>One note:
>
>Playing EGTB vs NoEGTB to see if EGTB helps is probably the wrong way to measure
>the experiment.  It is more useful to take a known good program _with_ EGTBs,
>and play your favorite engine against it, with your engine not using 'em, then
>playing again with 'em.  If the opponent doesn't have 'em, then your not having
>them might not expose the problem as well as making sure your opponent can
>always win those tricky cases and you now have to rely only on your eval to hang
>on...

Yes, true, in fact self-play (ie. with EGTBs vs without) as I did can mask this.

Although I doubt the conclusion will be different with the fully proper test.

Vas



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