Author: Ed Schröder
Date: 12:20:32 01/28/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 28, 2000 at 14:15:40, Christophe Theron wrote: >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. In my ChessMachine days I did this experiment too but then with real 40/2h games between 2 identical engines. I can only confirm the results of your statistic program. Ed > Christophe
This page took 0.01 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.