Author: Harald Faber
Date: 00:51:05 09/03/99
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On September 03, 1999 at 03:16:50, Bruce Moreland wrote: >On September 02, 1999 at 20:02:55, Heiko Mikala wrote: > >>And I say what you're saying is clearly wrong. Believe me, I learned this the >>hard way during the last ten years of work on my own chess program. I often had >>the case that in a first test match of about 30-40 games my program convincingly >>won a match, than let it play another, longer match overnight and during the >>next day, which it than lost. You always need the same amount of games, no >>matter how the score is after a first, short match. My experience after hundreds >>of test matches shows, that you need at least 70-80 games to be able to come to >>a conclusion. And you need some hundred games to be sure. Even if the first 15 >>games end in an 15-0 score. Because the next 15 games may end 0-15. This is a >>frustrating fact, but it is *a fact*. It's frustrating, because for us as >>programmers it means, that we have to do much more time consuming testing than >>we would like to do. > >It shouldn't work like this. You can't take a selection from somewhere in the >middle of a long run of games, and use that to prove anything, but if you start >out and play some games, and one program wins a several games in a row, you >should be able to make a safe conclusion. > >I would really like to understand the 15-0 and 0-15 situation. That should >*not* happen. That's not how math should work. If you flip a coin 15 times and >it comes up heads each time, the odds of this happening completely by chance are >extremely small. The odds that it would then come up tails 15 times in a row >are also extremely small, and combined they should be vanishingly small. Maybe Heiko exaggerated a bit but many people have seen 9-1, 8.5-1.5 or s.th. like these results in a row where the outcome was much different, more equal... That was the point. >bruce
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