On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Don Dailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Here is what I'm going to do: > > I will take an open source chess program, Toga, and run a multi-round > robin between 7 versions from fixed depth 1 to fixed depth 7. Two > versions of Toga at these 7 levels where one version has pawn structure, > king safety, and passed pawns turned off. ...
I am not familiar with chess programming, and I haven't been paying complete attention to this discussion, but I thought that I should comment on this. Without any background knowledge, I would expect that the bits of "knowledge" that you are turning off are present in the starting program largely because they do scale well. Furthermore, if your claim is: "a chess program with a better evaluation function improves MORE with increasing depth than one with a lesser evaluation function" ...then I don't see how you will make much progress at Settling the Matter with this study, since all it will show (at best) is that there exists one pair of evaluation functions that match your rule. A better approach, to my mind, would be to test a wide variety of different evaluation functions. As I understand it, you want to show that there is a strong correlation between their relative playing ability at (widely) different depths. Ideally, you should include as many evaluation functions as you can manage, and ones that are as different from each other as possible. Also, you possibly might want to also combine them with multiple, different kinds of pruning/searching/whatever-else-goes-into-a-chess-engine-that-isn't-considered-evaluation. This would show that you are exposing the general rule, rather than just an example of that rule. Am I misunderstanding your claim? Of course, that would be quite a bit of work, that I am suggesting. Perhaps a modest step in this direction would be to run tournaments between 3 versions of Toga, each with only one enabled feature out of the three that you identify. (Or perhaps two. However, avoid including combinations where one version has features that are a subset of another. This may help to mitigate objections such as my initial one above.) On the plus side, though, I see no reason to run any depths other than 1 and 7, since I think that you just want the rank correlation between two different depths. Weston _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
