bob wrote: ↑Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:46 am
My problem with that is as follows: When you play a game, do you decide when to offer/accept a draw or when to resign, or do you ask someone else (who is not even familiar with the current game)? I personally like to make my own decisions. I know what is going on in the game, regardless of the current material situation.
I want my chess program to do exactly the same. It is playing the game. It ought to get to make EVERY decision about how the game goes.
I also choose my own moves when playing chess on the opening, yet we know how dumb chess programs are when it comes to opening play, so for those instances, opening books, or pre-set openings, are preferable to letting the engine make "EVERY decision."
I'm not alone, in these discussions I'm pretty much representing everyone that prefers to test with books or by giving the engines opening positions to play where the engine didn't have a choice but playing from them. And I'm not going to name who are those people, because it's mostly EVERYONE. You tell me who tests engines without books and lets them play the opening by themselves, it'd save time.
I've seen so many instances of games where both engines say the position is 0.00, for a very long stretch of moves, and they're shuffling their pieces around. Then, suddenly, one of them blunders, and the evals fall to one side, and the other wins. Under what concept would I have allowed one engine to offer draw and the other to accept it to have a wrong game result? These are instances where stronger engines shouldn't be dumb and offer or accept draws from a weaker one.
This isn't about ME, these lines of arguments represent all the testers that only adjudicate draws in certain positions where draws are a certain result, and where having engines agreeing to early draws would be undesirable. An again, tell me from a tester that allows Winboard engines to agree to draws against each other to save time.
Most people don't allow engines to agree to draws by themselves, most people don't allow the engines to play the openings unassisted, and most people, at least from the top of engines developers, don't choose Winboard as their protocol.
I can't even be wrong about these, because they're facts.