Author: Michael Neish
Date: 18:43:36 01/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 20, 2000 at 08:07:28, Robert Hyatt wrote: >Yes, although the reasoning is often twisted a bit. IE yes, there is a >probability of almost 1.0 that if you play enough games, that one program will >win N in a row (ie 4 in the above). But the probability that this is the >_first_ N games played is very low. Somewhat like the "runs test" for random >number generators. Of course you are right, however we were discussing the probability of a washout occurring if only four games are played, and that is one in eight if both computers/players are evenly matched and there are no draws. The figures I gave for a 15-9 score are absolute probabilities, in other words you'd expect a 15-9 score to occur in sixteen out of a hundred 24-game matches. I did the same calculation including draws, but here one needs to know the proportion of games that tend to end in draws, which is surely different for each computer and also depends on the strength difference between them. It's curious that if you play a 24-game match between computers of equal strength, you can expect a 13-11 and 14-10 score to occur _more often_ than the expected 12-12, and a 15-9 score only slightly less often. Draws tend to even things out a little, so that extremely lopsided results have a lower chance of occurring. If you're interested I will give you the figures that I came up with, although anyone with a little bit of patience can easily work them out. While we're talking about this, do you know a place where I could get a table of percentage expectancy as a function of Elo difference? And also, do you know what the Elo difference is between White and Black? I heard it was about 25 or 27, but this is off the top of my head. Cheers, Mike.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.