Re: Tactics cannot be very important for chess
Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2019 9:19 am
Leela has zero "planning". Whatever the type, engines just calculate.
Can you give some examples of such games? Misevaluated at what depths? Obviously, all engines still lose games, so they must be making many mistakes, but you're making the cause of those mistakes sound very simple ("a single position evaluated wrongly").Ovyron wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2019 11:37 am Just look at a game where Stockfish lost, the blunder was caused by a distant position that it wrongly evaluated, and all the search was wasted because it tried to refute this wrong eval from both sides and failed, so it became the mainline, the nonsensical mainline that lost it the game, because of a single position evaluated wrongly.
They do that because if they just try to "fix" it based on one supposed blunder in one game, they'll weaken it in other ways and it'll show in other games. And how are they supposed to do this checking without using human judgement, which cannot be trusted?Ovyron wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2019 11:37 am But instead of going and checking how Stockfish loses a single game, people make a small tweak and play hundreds of thousands of games to see if it improves elo or not, without understanding why, because elo chasing is the norm, and an engine that doesn't lose any game ever but isn't good at winning either wouldn't have an outstanding elo, so they could even have it on their face and discard it.
Huh, can you show one example where this does NOT happen?
"Supposed blunders" don't exist. If a game was lost it's because a blunder happened. If no blunder happened the game ended in a draw.
How can a more accurate eval of positions weaken the engine?
Because you have all the time in the world, you could check what moves were not game losing blunders, see what was the eval for them and why was it scored worse than the PV (there's a problem somewhere because a superior move was compared to the PV move and the engine wrongly concluded it was a worse variation.) You make the eval more accurate so the engine doesn't pick the wrong line when comparing moves, and it should not have any drawbacks.
You won't produce a "more accurate eval of positions". You'll at best produce a more accurate eval of that one leaf position you're blaming for the engine losing the game. You can of course make the evaluation function bigger and bigger, but that comes at a cost.
Okay, but the question is if we can come to an agreement? Why not?
Dann Corbit wrote: ↑Fri Nov 01, 2019 7:03 pmThere is the notion that strategy is just deep tactics.bob wrote: ↑Fri Nov 01, 2019 6:56 pm A strong GM, many years ago, wrote something to the effect "Chess is purely about tactics..."
His thinking was the positional play is nothing more than very deep / very long-range tactics. IE what is bad about a backward pawn? It gives you a weakness and your opponent a target. A target that can't move, which will be around for a long time, most likely being lost at some point. In that light, I have to agree with him. At some point in the future we won't need a backward pawn evaluation term because the search will see deeply enough to realize the pawn will be won or lost, period. I have seen a few evaluation terms in my programs over the years that became superfluous.
The ultimate goal is to checkmate the opponent's king. That is purely a tactical goal.
And as the searches get deeper, the line between tactics and strategy may blur.
But there are some moves that we make which really do not have a tactical goal at the time we make them.
But I guess the bottom line is to always choose the best move(s). Whatever that may be.