Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 00:35:35 01/23/00
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On January 23, 2000 at 02:51:55, Amir Ban wrote: >The results can be disregarded on these grounds of course, but it's also true >that the results, as reported, can be dismissed as being in contradiction to the >DB/DT public record, and to common sense in general. Here are some ideas about what might have happened in those games: 1) DB Jr may have beaten those programs purely through eval function superiority. 2) It may have won because of superior search. 3) There may have been a poor comparison between node rates, resulting in DB Jr having a massive hardware advantage. 4) The whole thing may be ficticious. 5) Random chance. 6) Something I haven't thought of yet. Bob may go nuts because I included #4. I don't believe that #4 is true, but someone can always claim that it is, and there is no obvious evidence that can be used to refute this claim, which disadvantages us who want to understand this rather than argue religion and conspiracies all day. #1 is what we are expected to believe, I thought that is what this test was supposed to measure. I have a very hard time with this one. I don't believe there are any terms that in and of themselves would result in such a lopsided match. I don't believe that I could set up my program to search exactly a hundred million nodes per search, and play it against the best eval function I could possibly write, also searching a hundred million nodes per search, and score 38-2. Could I be convinced that #1 is true? You bet! Will I accept that #1 is true based upon faith in the reputations of Hsu and Campbell? With all due respect, not a chance. I don't think anyone should be expected to be so trusting in a field that's even remotely scientific. It would also be hard to accept #2, since DB is supposedly not optimized for short searches. And I believe that you've ruled out #5, which seems a sensible thing to do. My best guess would be #3. But if you told me that #3 is absolutely not possible, then I'll take #6 before #1, based upon what I know today. bruce
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