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Subject: Re: EGTB access and playing strength

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 18:40:18 01/29/06

Go up one level in this thread


On January 29, 2006 at 19:10:52, Stuart Cracraft wrote:

>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...
>
>Also - I think the sample size has to be MUCH larger than what we are talking.
>
>A few hundred games is not going to do it.
>
>Start with a few thousand for the EGTB and work your way up from there.
>
>Stuart


The general rule-of-thumb is that the closer two programs are in skill, the more
games you need to really see whether one is better or not....



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