Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:01:01 01/28/00
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On January 28, 2000 at 14:40:35, Christophe Theron wrote: [snip] >After 10 games, if no program wins by 64.0% or more => play on >After 20 games, if no program wins by 61.0% or more => play on >After 40 games, if no program wins by 58.0% or more => play on >After 100 games, if no program wins by 55.0% or more => play on >After 200 games, if no program wins by 53.5% or more => play on > >And so on. > >If you play two identical programs, you are likely to play on forever. That >sounds strange, but it's only logical. > >And to answer your question, I thought that playing 40 games between Tiger and >Diep and 40 games between Tiger and Crafty would be enough, because I think the >difference between Tiger and these programs is above 56 elo points. Unfortunately, this method does not work. You always have to play the thousand games to know the answer that you would have to play if they were separated by one ELO. Why? Because you don't really know if they are separated by 10 ELO or 1000 ELO. Take a penny and flip it ten times. If every reader of CCC did this, probably several would get 90% or better results from a fair coin. So -- here we did our ten trials and got a 90% result. So we have conclusively PROVEN that heads (or tails) is stronger. ***NOT*** What's wrong? It is just that a fair contest between equals is INDISTINGUISHABLE from a completely lopsided affair. It always, and I do mean ALWAYS requires the full set of trials to know something about the relative strengths. A blasting in a short series tells us almost NOTHING.
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