Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 01:24:25 11/26/99
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On November 24, 1999 at 00:36:41, Michael Neish wrote: >Having recently written my first program, which can search only up to 6-ply, >that's if you want it to move sometime before the big crunch, I thought what >would happen if I stubbornly kept to a 6-ply limit and just tried to improve >the program's playing strength by giving it increasingly better positional >sense? I'm going to speculate a lot, assuming the normal chess program model involving an eval function at the tips, rather than an eval function that guides the search. I think that in this case eval is like the tread pattern on tires, and search is like the drive train. If there's no tread on the tires, you can't apply power to the road. If the tread pattern is seriously wrong, you'll have a hard time controlling the car and you might go off the road. If the tread pattern is right, the power goes to the road and you are happy. If the tread pattern is super-wonderful, then perhaps things work a little better, but you'd get more advantage if you improved the drive train. So I think that if you stick to six plies you'll get your butt kicked by programs that search much deeper than this. You'll lose on tactics in positions that are better, and you'll be forced to make positional concessions in order to avoid tactical consequences that you barely see, and you'll lose because of this. There are positions that you might understand perfectly but in most cases you'll still lose because of the incredible tenacity of the deep searchers. It is hard for a creative guesser to defeat a diligent researcher consistently, and that is what you'd be trying to do. I think you'd do a little better against humans than you'd expect from your rating against computers though. Fatal tactical mistakes against computers often turn out to be excellent positional bluffs against humans. bruce
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