Author: Colin Frayn
Date: 02:19:40 02/02/00
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On February 01, 2000 at 14:42:02, Dann Corbit wrote: >On February 01, 2000 at 13:04:07, Colin Frayn wrote: >>Does anyone know what the limitations (if any) on the use of opening books in >>computer chess tournaments are? Is there a standard book that everyone has to >>use, or can you basically make a book as big as you like? > >An excellent opening book can give you a very decisive advantage. >If you could make a very large one and yet keep the high quality, it would be >dominating. You would put your opponents under a lot of time pressure, since >you saved it up front with the book. OK, I basically just added a new function into my chess program, ColChess, to learn openings as it goes along (as you know, Dann). I taught it pretty much nothing at the beginning, about 6 positions like open with e4 or d4 all the time, reply e4 with e5 or c5, and reply d4 with d5 or Nf6, and maybe 2 more, and then I let it run against GNUChess for 50 games with a fairly secure learning algorithm which basically means that it will pick out the winning openings, but not overstretch itself so that it learns a bad opening after a blunder, which is a waste of space and time. I just left it running against Crafty last night for another 50 games, and the opening book is already 108 positions, and is growing by the minute :) The benefits that I can see of this method are multiple. Especially; (1) It learns only the good openings. (2) It finetunes the weighting so that it plays its best openings more often. (3) It saves me typing the whole damn lot in, or writing a parser for existing pgn ones. The only problem is that, playing against Crafty I'm not going to win any of the matches, so at the moment it's just learning the book from Crafty's perspective. Hopefully, once the book is large enough, I can somehow cripple GNUChess or something, and my program should be able to win rather often, meaning that it can finetune the book so that it only plays the openings it like :) Well, that's the theory, anyway... Let me know if I'm being an idiot;) Cheers, Colin
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