Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 10:02:27 10/10/99
Go up one level in this thread
> My god, you can turn of all learning if you play against the program > and do want to get different openings. What is your problem ? Time. Why every time it gets out of the book I have to wait minutes to have it go through identical calculation with the identical result it did earlier? Some people have other work to do, it takes enough time to play chess as it is, to have to _needlessly_ wait (I don't mind waiting if it is the first time calculating a position). The problem is that the program manufacturers have gotten caught up so much in getting an edge in the mindless machine-machine autoplay, they forgot the customer, and thus have designed the "learning" feature which is well suited for quickly locking in into a "killer line" against another program and (due to the lack of common sense in the testing procedure) winning identical game ten times against a program which doesn't have this kind of "learning." Since human player doesn't fall for (and doesn't appreciate someone even trying out) such idiotic tricks, the feature is not only useless but outright contrary to the customer's convenience. He can either play the same line ad infinitum (with "learning" on) or waste time waiting for mindless repetition of the identical calculation. It would be enough to enable this kind of "learning" in machine-machine autoplay only, and make it do a common-sensical user oriented learning otherwise, i.e. all moves, evaluations & thinking times are remembered so it never calculates the same thing over (user may wish to choose whether, when playing at same level in the same position next time, s/he wants the earlier computed move played instantly or deepened, for the duration appropriate to a given level). The game result should not skew the odds of an opening, so it can keep the variety for users convenience. The only way the learning should affect future choices is that if in a previous game the program has obtained negative evaluation at some point (regardless of the final game result, which may be due to completely unrelated causes far away from this evaluation), it should back off one (preferably) or two moves (at most) and pick something else. But it certainly should not drop the whole Sicilian or French, or even a particular line, just because it lost few games in that (perfectly good) opening/line for completely unrelated reasons well beyond the opening. So it's the publicizing of mindless machine-machine autoplay results in combination with the short term sales-folk cheap gimmick mentality prevailing among the program manufacters that has resulted in shunting the customer's time and convenience out of the loop. It will be enough for one leading program to have a usable customer oriented learning for others to snap out of the loop they caught themselves in. That cycle occurs with other software and other products all the time, it will happen here. The discussion on the subject will only help speed up the inevitable.
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