Author: Tom King
Date: 14:52:56 12/11/99
Which of the well known test suites predicts the strength of chess programs most accurately? I ask this, because I recently made some *slight* mods. to the evaluation function in my program, Francesca. I ran the LCT-2 suite, and the results indicated that it was a wash - the modification gave me about 5 ELO points, apparently. I then ran a series of fast games against another amateur program. I realize it's important to play a large number of games, to reduce the margin of error, so I ran two matches of 65 games. The result was this: MATCH 1 "Normal" Francesca scored 37% against the amateur program. MATCH 2 "Modified" Francesca scored 45% against the amateur program. Quite a difference! It implies that the modification is worth over 50 ELO. I guess I need to play more games, against a variety of programs to verify whether this improvement is real, or imaginary. Anyhow, beware of reading too much into ELO predictions of test suites.. Cheers All, Tom
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