Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 11:05:12 01/26/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 26, 2000 at 13:03:09, Christophe Theron wrote: >On January 26, 2000 at 10:27:38, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On January 26, 2000 at 01:38:07, Christophe Theron wrote: >> >>> >>> >>>I don't forget this. >>> >>>I'm just saying that the thing could have been much stronger if they had worked >>>on implementing a good pruning scheme rather than this SE thing. >>> >>> >> >> >>I definitely don't agree here. I watched them play *socrates at an acm event, >>where *socrates was searching considerably faster than they were in terms of >>NPS, and in terms of depth of search reached. They blew *socrates out on a >>tactical level anyway... > > >But you are only talking about ONE game, or maybe only a FEW games that you have >witnessed yourself. > >You do not know how good or bad *Socrates pruning scheme was. > >I would not conclude from this that no pruning is better than pruning. > >On the other hand, years of study and practical experience have shown that using >a good pruning scheme is way better than not using one. > > Be careful. You can state something in two ways, where they sound the same but are not: 1. their results show that their pruning is good. 2. their results do not show that their pruning (or lack thereof) is bad. the two statements are significantly different. I can only conclude that what they did is not bad... not that it is good or "best"... > > > >>>Maybe or maybe not. >>> >>>My interest was rather in the fact that they used a probably suboptimal approach >>>in a multimillion dollars project. >>> >>>Not sure anymore if you are interested in talking about this... >>> >>> >> >> >>I am always interested. I had said before that I would like to see how I >>could play on hardware that would drive my search to a depth of 19 plies. > > >You seem so keen on this idea that a pruning system is not useful at deeper >levels that you should do the experiment yourself. I'm not 'keen' on it at all. Notice that I don't claim this is true. I said it "might" be true. > >Let Crafty without null move play games against the normal Crafty. Give the >non-pruning one enough time to simulate a Crafty running at DB's speed. > >Your null-move version will beat the non pruning one, even with a huge time >handicap. > >If it doesn't, then you have a point and this would be a new and interesting >thing. You could write a paper on this, and we would better understand DB. > >You have done experiments on the "dimishing returns" idea. This is related to >this idea, isn't it worth experimenting? > > yes it is, except for the simulating DB part. It would take a year to play one game. :) > > >>But I am a long way from being ready to say "they probably used a suboptimal >>approach in a multimillion dollars project" since I don't have the hardware to >>play with. But what if I had a null-move and non-null-move crafty, and on the >>new hardware, the non-null-move program made fewer mistakes overall? I'd go >>with that in an instant. Where on slower hardware the null-move depth gained >>might be very worth-while (it obviously is as I use it today)... > > >Do the experiment... It just requires that you let a PC run for enough time >(maybe a month or two). > > > > >>I simply can't say their way was right or wrong without testing a known program >>to see. If all I have to go on is their results, I have to say they did well. > > >If you want to live on facts on this issue, you can easily do it. I'm sure you >can find a computer for this experiment. > > > > Christophe
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