I think that it is harder than you think because drawing moves are not the same and if the random player is unlucky to make a bad drawing moveDon wrote:I don't understand your difficulty. A random move might be the best move on the board and thus 2 random moves in a row have a chance to be two best moves in a row. 3 is even less likely but still possible and so on. Therefore it is theoretically possible for a random player to play a perfect game, i.e. every move is best. I never claimed it was likely, but the context of the argument was about playing infinitely bad and that is almost impossible to do unless you simply resign on every move.carldaman wrote:Hi Don,Random moves are much stronger than losing move because a random player will draw once in a while even against a perfect player.
the above statement doesn't make sense, as random moves are more likely to be bad, leading to a loss sooner rather than later, even if some random moves may actually be good along the way.
Interesting idea about calibrating to zero based on random moves, though.
Regards,
CL
Chances are that a random player will play horribly but due to the laws of probability it will occasionally play good enough to draw even a perfect player.
Of course I understand how rare this is, but it's not impossible.
Most people have a backwards model of how chess strength works. It has nothing to do with you, it's all about your opponent. You cannot "go after" the half point, you have to wait for your opponent to give it to you while not making a blunder yourself.
There is really no such thing as a "great" move. You are never in a losing position and muster so much brain power that you create a win. You hear language like that in chess books that romanticize chess sometimes, especially the older book that fawn over the old masters. But that is not how it works.
So for a random player to play a "good" game we really mean that it is "lucky" enough to avoid all the game theoretical half or full point losses.
I think a lot of positions have multiple moves that are (theoretically) the same so it's not quite so hard as having to find 1 move out of 40 for 50 or 60 moves in row.
then in the next moves he is not going to have multiple drawing moves to defend the position.
I also think that it is impossible to force a draw in 60 moves so even if the random player is lucky to have a draw position after 60 moves then it is still probably a loss for the random player.
I believe that the probability of the random player to draw a game against the perfect player is clearly lower than 1/(10^100)
Considering the fact that we have less than 10^8 seconds in a year
you are not going to find a single draw for the random player against the perfect player even after 10^10 years(that means less than 10^20 chess games even when we assume 100 games per second).