bob wrote:
I suspect you will have changed your methodology by then so it will be moot. It is going to be _very_ difficult to get to 2000 on tactics alone. I've not tried to play games with crafty using no eval but material in the last 10 years, but when I last did that, it was very ugly. Not every position has a tactical solution. In fact, most don't. Making horrible moves in those positions means you only reach positions where you will finally see tactically that you are lost.
Bob:
What do you know about the positional strength of my engine?
Where did you get this information?
Did I mention anything about the relative strengths of my positional play vs. my tactical play anywhere?
Have you ever even touched my engine?
1. absolutely nothing. And I intend to keep it that way.
This is yet another rude, uncalled for, comment.
You have a serious issue that you need to deal with. You asked a pretty rude question. I gave you a dead-on honest response. If you don't like the response, how about not asking stupid and provocative questions??? Ever think of that?
[
If you intend to stay away from my engine, I ask you to stay away from threads where I explicitly talk about it. Feel free to discuss similar questions in other threads.
2. nowhere.
3. Yes. You at least mentioned that you believed it better to teach tactics first, and then positional/strategic play. You also said your local chess federation teaches that way. And then you have said several times that you are not making positional changes, you are making speedup and/or basic search changes. So based on past comments by you, you certainly implied that your eval was very simplistic at present.
It is far less simplistic than that of a large majority of the engines I play against. Without you knowing anything about my engine, please refrain from commenting.
If you're not interested, leave me alone.
consider it done. I've wasted more than enough time already...
4. No, and I intend to keep that that way as well.
Now, for my question: What is your problem? You want to pick minute points and argue those to death, without worrying about the larger picture I am trying to paint.
bob wrote:
And we dance around how many games are needed, quoting statistics that depend on an infinite number of games, or on a few games, or on the phase of the moon. When the only point I started out with was that it takes far more games than most believe to really understand which program is better or which version is better or which programming change is better. And nothing has changed that point at all, we've just wasted a ton of time on side-issues...
Okay, I'll try to ask the question the other way round:
Under what, if any, circumstances would you deem a low, but not too low, number of games (let's say, a gauntlet against 20 engines, match of two against each), to be acceptable? Be as extreme as you like.
I can't think of one personally. Normal engine-engine matches produce even more variance than I am seeing, because the opening book quality becomes a _major_ issue. As does the algorithm you use to choose moves from your book. I chose to eliminate this significant part of the randomness for these tests. I will certainly, at some point, play games using a book, but then I will be only looking at how the book affects the results against several opponents, so that I have an idea of whether the book needs work or not. But I am not trying to test that in these matches, only evaluate change that were made to the engine itself.
So even a result of 0-40 for version A, and 40-0 for version 40' wouldn't let you conclude that version A' ist stronger, at your chosen confidence level (or whatever the confidence level would be for this result, you do the math)?
First I don't ever expect, nor have I seen such a result. I've never lost a match of any significant length with zero wins or draws, so I can't go that far in speculating. But one thing is for sure, the more random features you add in, and books, pondering, SMP are big ones, the more games you have to play to produce a result with a reasonable level of confidence.
Just answer the question please. Or just say explicitly that you're not interested in an objective discussion. No, come to think of it, you don't need to do that, you've made it very clear already.
I have certainly learned a few things in this discussion.
1. My intuitive approach is sound at closer inspection.
2. My image of Prof. Hyatt as a person, and as a researcher, has considerably deteriorated. I know he will care about this as much as if a bicycle in China has fallen over, but it makes me sad.
At least you got the last part of #2 right. I won't respond again...
bob wrote:Scrappy has been on some but nobody plays it.
I've noticed that programs that haven't played in a long time won't show up for example with "who C2000-9999" because their ratings are out of date. Only after the program satisfies the [need] quota will it be displayed. Some people check this way for active computers instead of consulting the seek lists.
That might explain it. I didn't think to check that, but I am certain all of scrappy's ratings are now "provisional" since it has not played in about 2 years now...
Uri Blass wrote:programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
one of the main problems of Eden is that it is very slow and I say very slow I mean that it is probably possible to make it more than 10 times faster.
If you also add better order of moves and hash then I believe that it can get above 2000 with no evaluation change.
Uri
I remain unconvinced of that. In blitz games, on a chess server, perhaps, and I plan on testing this hypothesis in real games myself before long.
How can you test THAT hypothesis if you are not going to touch my engine? Oh, I see, you're going to test a different hypothesis and then claim it'll apply to my engine.
Again, put brain in gear before putting keyboard in motion. I stated _exactly_ how _I_ would test that hypothesis. I didn't stutter. I didn't speak in a foreign language. I said _specifically_ :
I am going to take crafty, and cut out all eval but material and piece/square values, and run it on ICC to see what that does. If Crafty doesn't reach 2000 that way, I can guarantee you your program won't reach 2000 that way either. If Crafty does reach 2000, then it would suggest Uri's hypothesis that material + PC/sq + todays hardware is good enough.
Not one person mentioned _your_ program in this particular idea, so why do you keep coming up with that kind of crap???
I am not, and never have, claimed _anything_ applied to your engine, except for normal sound software engineering principles which apply to _all_ program development efforts...
sheesh...
You mentioned his program earlier
"If you wait until you get to 2000+ before you start to plan on doing things a 2000+ program has to do, something tells me you are never going to get there... "
I think that with today hardware it is simply nonsense and I said that I believe that even piece square table program can do it.
My guess is that Crafty with piece square table is enough to get ICC rating above 2000(I also think that it is possible to improve Crafty's search so even if it is not correct it does not prove that my initial hypothesis is wrong).
Note that I expect Crafty with piece square table evaluation to have at least 2200 ICC rating assuming that you choose good piece square table(for example you should evaluate 2 pieces as more than rook and pawn and you should have higher values for advanced pawns considering the fact that you do not evaluate passed pawns).
Uri Blass wrote:programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
one of the main problems of Eden is that it is very slow and I say very slow I mean that it is probably possible to make it more than 10 times faster.
If you also add better order of moves and hash then I believe that it can get above 2000 with no evaluation change.
Uri
I remain unconvinced of that. In blitz games, on a chess server, perhaps, and I plan on testing this hypothesis in real games myself before long.
How can you test THAT hypothesis if you are not going to touch my engine? Oh, I see, you're going to test a different hypothesis and then claim it'll apply to my engine.
You seem to be confused about what THAT hypothesis is. The hypothesis is:
Uri Blass wrote:programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
This has nothing to do with YOUR engine, but engines today in general. Would you please stop annoying the rest of us by desperately trying to argue against everything Bob says, or if you insist on arguing worthless points, do it in private messages where the rest of us don't have to see it. But if you refuse to do either of those, at least you could actually try to understand what he's saying before you try to argue.
This is so ridiculous, because the thread of argument is right there for you to look at. Uri said ".. Eden is that it is very slow and I say very slow I mean that it is probably possible to make it more than 10 times faster.
If you also add better order of moves and hash then I believe that it can get above 2000 with no evaluation change."
The hypothesis is clearly "Eden can get above 2000 with no evaluation change". I don't understand what is missing for this to be in-your-face obvious.
If bob meant anything else, why did he choose to leave that part quoted??
bob wrote:
I suspect you will have changed your methodology by then so it will be moot. It is going to be _very_ difficult to get to 2000 on tactics alone. I've not tried to play games with crafty using no eval but material in the last 10 years, but when I last did that, it was very ugly. Not every position has a tactical solution. In fact, most don't. Making horrible moves in those positions means you only reach positions where you will finally see tactically that you are lost.
Bob:
What do you know about the positional strength of my engine?
Where did you get this information?
Did I mention anything about the relative strengths of my positional play vs. my tactical play anywhere?
Have you ever even touched my engine?
1. absolutely nothing. And I intend to keep it that way.
This is yet another rude, uncalled for, comment.
You have a serious issue that you need to deal with. You asked a pretty rude question. I gave you a dead-on honest response. If you don't like the response, how about not asking stupid and provocative questions??? Ever think of that?
It would not have been rude if you had left out the second part. I didn't ask you what you planned to do with my engine, I just wanted to clarify that you were making unsubstantiated claims based on uninformed speculations.
Bob, I find it hard to understand why you feel the need to constantly attack me personally. I will dig up all the cases where you did so if you don't believe me.
You can also believe me that by now I have many things I could post that I am restraining myself to post. I don't understand why you cannot show the same restraint.
Uri Blass wrote:programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
one of the main problems of Eden is that it is very slow and I say very slow I mean that it is probably possible to make it more than 10 times faster.
If you also add better order of moves and hash then I believe that it can get above 2000 with no evaluation change.
Uri
I remain unconvinced of that. In blitz games, on a chess server, perhaps, and I plan on testing this hypothesis in real games myself before long.
How can you test THAT hypothesis if you are not going to touch my engine? Oh, I see, you're going to test a different hypothesis and then claim it'll apply to my engine.
You seem to be confused about what THAT hypothesis is. The hypothesis is:
Uri Blass wrote:programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
This has nothing to do with YOUR engine, but engines today in general. Would you please stop annoying the rest of us by desperately trying to argue against everything Bob says, or if you insist on arguing worthless points, do it in private messages where the rest of us don't have to see it. But if you refuse to do either of those, at least you could actually try to understand what he's saying before you try to argue.
Would you please not claim that you are the voice of "the rest of us"? If you have anything topical to say, fine. But if you think that Bob cannot defind himself sufficiently, think again.
I am not arguing against everything Bob says; in fact I am supporting part of what he's saying in other threads, I have agreed with him in these threads here and I am taking a stand against those people directly that he is trying to save that give too much significance to a few games.
The only thing I am disagreeing with is that he claims that his approach is necessary even for engines at a much lower level; that statistics cannot show that there are many cases when fewer games are needed to confirm a hypothesis.
And I certainly disagree with his apparent need to attack people personally, calling them immature or (the other day, in another thread) telling them that they would fail in his classes.
Uri Blass wrote:programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
one of the main problems of Eden is that it is very slow and I say very slow I mean that it is probably possible to make it more than 10 times faster.
If you also add better order of moves and hash then I believe that it can get above 2000 with no evaluation change.
Uri
I remain unconvinced of that. In blitz games, on a chess server, perhaps, and I plan on testing this hypothesis in real games myself before long.
How can you test THAT hypothesis if you are not going to touch my engine? Oh, I see, you're going to test a different hypothesis and then claim it'll apply to my engine.
You seem to be confused about what THAT hypothesis is. The hypothesis is:
Uri Blass wrote:programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
This has nothing to do with YOUR engine, but engines today in general. Would you please stop annoying the rest of us by desperately trying to argue against everything Bob says, or if you insist on arguing worthless points, do it in private messages where the rest of us don't have to see it. But if you refuse to do either of those, at least you could actually try to understand what he's saying before you try to argue.
This is so ridiculous, because the thread of argument is right there for you to look at. Uri said ".. Eden is that it is very slow and I say very slow I mean that it is probably possible to make it more than 10 times faster.
If you also add better order of moves and hash then I believe that it can get above 2000 with no evaluation change."
The hypothesis is clearly "Eden can get above 2000 with no evaluation change". I don't understand what is missing for this to be in-your-face obvious.
If bob meant anything else, why did he choose to leave that part quoted??
Here is Uri's post: Please pay _close_ attention to the very first sentence:
Uri Blass wrote:
programs today do not need more than piece square table evaluation and fast search to reach 2000
one of the main problems of Eden is that it is very slow and I say very slow I mean that it is probably possible to make it more than 10 times faster.
If you also add better order of moves and hash then I believe that it can get above 2000 with no evaluation change.
"programs of today". Not "Eden".
Why is _that_ so apparently difficult for you to follow???
BTW I did _not_ exclude that form the original quote as you implied. Just look back up in this post and you will see that quote is sitting right there as well.
Therefore, I said I didn't believe that, but would test the hypothesis using Crafty since it is easy enough to do...
bob wrote:
I suspect you will have changed your methodology by then so it will be moot. It is going to be _very_ difficult to get to 2000 on tactics alone. I've not tried to play games with crafty using no eval but material in the last 10 years, but when I last did that, it was very ugly. Not every position has a tactical solution. In fact, most don't. Making horrible moves in those positions means you only reach positions where you will finally see tactically that you are lost.
Bob:
What do you know about the positional strength of my engine?
Where did you get this information?
Did I mention anything about the relative strengths of my positional play vs. my tactical play anywhere?
Have you ever even touched my engine?
1. absolutely nothing. And I intend to keep it that way.
This is yet another rude, uncalled for, comment.
You have a serious issue that you need to deal with. You asked a pretty rude question. I gave you a dead-on honest response. If you don't like the response, how about not asking stupid and provocative questions??? Ever think of that?
It would not have been rude if you had left out the second part. I didn't ask you what you planned to do with my engine, I just wanted to clarify that you were making unsubstantiated claims based on uninformed speculations.
Problem is I had _zero_ speculations in my post. Absolutely zero.
You just don't read carefully and think about what _might_ be under discussion, and assume everything is directed toward you personally, or else toward your program.