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Subject: Re: Is SSDF list level is now badly inflated?!

Author: Gunnar Andersson

Date: 13:24:32 09/28/99

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On September 28, 1999 at 09:38:30, Robert Hyatt wrote:


>
>
>I don't think this is the issue.  Here are some problems that have to be
>overcome:
>
>1.  no "evaluation" can pick a good book move without a deep search to go
>with it.  Why?  Because humans can't pick good book moves in most positions
>without a lot of prior searching (done by others) to guide them.  Hence the
>plethora of books like MCO, ECO, BCO, etc...

My mistake - I referred to the program learning opening deviations using deep
searches for alternative moves to the ones actually played in the database. For
this to work out, the evaluation function must
(a) be pretty good, or otherwise a huge search depth is needed
(b) have a global interpretation, i.e. be comparable between game stages

The simple scheme "find best deviation for all database positions, then negamax
entire game tree including deviations" gives extremely good results in the
domain of Othello, considerably stronger than the other opening book schemes
proposed.


>
>2.  frequency of play is not a good guideline in many cases, because a recent
>refutation gets swamped by all the times it was played successfully in the
>past.

Indeed. Strong humans analyze enough games for this to be less of a factor, I
suppose.

>
>3.  opening theory has many outright mistakes that are waiting to get found.
>At the highest levels of play, opening preparation is hugely important.  As of
>now, computers are not good at doing this.

Automatically searching for tactical refutations seems possible. A potential
danger would of course be that the program doesn't understand the positional
compensation the side with less material can have.

/ Gunnar



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