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Subject: Re: Tablebase statistic

Author: Owen Lyne

Date: 05:42:27 12/17/99

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On December 17, 1999 at 06:13:40, guy haworth wrote:

>Yes, the stats are a little misleading because the game may be 'on the way
>through' that profile.  In fact, the games averaged only 7 moves in the
>nominated profile - compared to theoretical depths now going up to 243 (KRNKNN).

In fact the stats are very misleading for many reasons. For example, many
one-sided endgames don't occur, because the losing side has resigned first,
so the games that actually occur are biased towards the drawn ones (or at least,
not so obviously won ones). Also, what matters to analysing a game
accurately is all the lines that might have occured, but didn't. So a computer
is probing the 5 main tablebases while there are many more than 5 pieces
on the board and these database stats tell you nothing about that. And the
typical human-human game doesn't not necessarily have the same endgame
properties as a comp-comp or comp-human one. What would
be needed would be a representative sample of say, Crafty's games, with all
currently available TB's activated, with logging of all probes (which might
well kill Crafty's perfomance in itself and make people doubt the validity
of the experiment). Even with this information, you still don't know
what really matters, because winning won positions a little faster is
rather less interesting than getting a win instead of a draw from the
tablebase hits. And tracing through the search to see the crucial information
to win the game.... eek...

Owen



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