Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 11:15:40 01/28/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 28, 2000 at 13:56:38, Dann Corbit wrote:
>On January 28, 2000 at 12:07:17, David Paulowich wrote:
>
>>On January 28, 2000 at 07:27:54, Enrique Irazoqui wrote:
>>
>>>There is a degree of uncertainty, but I don't think you need 1000 matches of 200
>>>games each to have an idea of who is best.
>>>
>>>Fischer became a chess legend for the games he played between his comeback in
>>>1970 to the Spassky match of 1972. In this period of time he played 157 games
>>>that proved to all of us without the hint of a doubt that he was the very best
>>>chess player of those times.
>>>
>>>Kasparov has been the undisputed best for many years. From 1984 until now, he
>>>played a total of 772 rated games. He needed less than half these games to
>>>convince everyone about who is the best chess player.
>>>
>>>This makes more sense to me than the probability stuff of your Qbasic program.
>>>Otherwise we would reach the absurd of believing that all the rankings in the
>>>history of chess are meaningless, and Capablanca, Fischer and Kasparov had long
>>>streaks of luck.
>>>
>>>You must have thought along these lines too when you proposed the matches
>>>Tiger-Diep and Tiger-Crafty as being meaningful, in spite of not being 200,000
>>>games long.
>>>
>>>Enrique
>>
>>
>>I think we need to treat men and machines differently here. I can accept a
>>20 game match between two human players as conclusive, for the year it was
>>played. And a 400 game match between two computers would convince me.
>>As long as the computers have a completely different way of playing,
>>looking at thousands of times more positions than human players do, they
>>may have to play much longer matches to produce truly convincing results.
>
>I think both positions are not correct. We see an experiment and assume it is
>repeatable because it repeated. I flip a penny twenty times and it comes up
>heads 18 out of 20. What are the odds it will be a head on the next flip? It
>is 0.5 out of 1, the same as if it had been 18 tails out of 20. We watch a
>brilliant game and think that we can draw from that that player x is much
>stronger than player y. The truth of the matter is that we probably understand
>the play of neither x nor y since they are hundreds of times better than we are
>anyway.
>
>The ability of a player, whether man or machine, can be judged rationally only
>by a purely mathematical basis. Observing a few games and drawing a conclusion
>is the same sort of science as burning witches and eating mercury to live
>forever. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time, but it did not have the
>scientific basis it purported to possess.
I would not have expressed this better myself.
This is not going to make both of us popular though, because many peoples have
almost-religious beliefs about the computer chess topic.
Christophe
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