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Subject: Re: EGTB access and playing strength

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 19:32:31 01/29/06

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On January 29, 2006 at 21:40:18, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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....

Yes - I'd be interested to know of any papers that have been done to quanity
the magnitude of the difference and the magnitude of games both.

Stuart



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