GothicChessInventor wrote:
After the game, if the program cannot demonstrate "mate in n-1" or quicker for every legal response to the initial mate announcment, nor play out the mate properly for both sides, then the opponent is awarded the draw.
I must admit that I have some reservations w.r.t. this rule. It adds a lot of complexity, and I am not sure there is any practical benefit. Although I feel the same hurt as you when I see that a KBBKN win is killed by the 50-move rule because it happens to take 75 moves to force the conversion, such things happen extremely rarely. Many of the very long wins that are displayed on your website are found in end-games with Pawns, and would most likely not be draws even under the 50-move rule, as you would now and then advance the Pawn. You would need DTZ EGTBs to see that, and the long DTM does not necessarily tell you there is a problem. It could be that Gothic Chess in general has more lengthy end-games than normal Chess, because of the larger board, but if this is the case, the natural solution would be just to adopt, say, a 60-move rule in stead. We should really make an inventarization of DTZ requirements of the various end-games to see gow large the number of moves would have to be to solve 99.9% of all problems.
The 50 Move Rule should only be for human players. Players get tired, and frustrated. Recall FIDE changed this rule a few times when Ken Thompson published his long wins in the 1980s.
Computers don't need the 50, 60, or even 200 move rule. What is needed is some way to keep human programmers from abusing the rule we come up with.
It there's a cool mate in 200+ moves, I'd like to see programs play it out!
Again, this misses the point. Most of us plan on playing against humans. If all you want to do is play against computers, then your idea could be simplified to say that games are won by usual rules, they are drawn by 50 move or repetition unless the winning side can demonstrate a forced win via endgame tables...
But against humans, this is not going to happen, as we are going to be forever bound by the FIDE rules. Where the 50 move rule is now unconditional, the exceptions raised by Ken have long since been thrown out by human player demand....
Humans are a done deal. The strongest player is not a Human at this very moment, and Humans will even be less competative in the future due to further hardware advances. Only those who are stuck in the past would see beating Humans as a worthy goal...
But that is all beside the point. "We all" is an erroneous statement even if there is one person on the planet that doesn't agree. And from the people I know, those aiming to beat Humans is a vast minority.
You don't seem to be in touch with reality at all. In the other thread I already introduced the term "solipsistic reality" for this, and this is another clear example.
Last edited by hgm on Thu Jan 17, 2008 10:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
"we all only care about how small our engines are, rather than how strong they play"
So you think _I_ am the only person that is developing a chess engine to beat strong humans?
get real...
He did not say that you are the only one but I believe that the majority of programmers do not care about playing against humans because today it is not a problem to beat the humans that you play against them(and the question if you score 70% or 90% is not very interesting).
Most engines can beat more than 99.999% of humans and if we talk about strong GM's then I see no reason for them to be interested in playing serious matches against programs that are significantly weaker than rybka(no sponsor is going to care if a GM can beat an engine that is not close to the top).
hgm wrote:Humans are a done deal. The strongest player is not a Human at this very moment, and Humans will even be less competative in the future due to further hardware advances. Only those who are stuck in the past would see beating Humans as a worthy goal...
But that is all beside the point. "We all" is an erroneous statement even if there is one person on the planet that doesn't agree. And from the people I know, those aiming to beat Humans is a vast minority.
You don't seem to be in touch with reality at all. In the other thread I already introduced the term "solipsistic reality" for this, and this is another clear example.
Note that the only target of beating humans that may be interesting is beating humans with material handicap but in this case I think that you need to use psychological factors like what you expect the opponent not to see to perform better.
Beating more humans with queen handicap is a different type of task than writing a program to perform better in games against other programs.
One reason that most programmers are not interested in the first task is because it is easier to test the second task.
Another reason is that programming something like if I do this and the opponent does not see this seems to be harder task and programmers prefer to do easier things.
Indeed, opponent modelling is an entirely different field, not touched by most Chess programmers.
But it is completely irrelevant what is done more frequently; _everything_ that is supported should work flawlessly, even if it is as outlandish as playing the Crazyhouse version of shuffle Shatranj on an ICS.
Furthermore note that FIDE rules only have a very limited jurisdiction, and people playing Gothic Chess, Shatranj, Xiangqi or Shogi are not bound by them even now...
hgm wrote:Humans are a done deal. The strongest player is not a Human at this very moment, and Humans will even be less competative in the future due to further hardware advances. Only those who are stuck in the past would see beating Humans as a worthy goal...
But that is all beside the point. "We all" is an erroneous statement even if there is one person on the planet that doesn't agree. And from the people I know, those aiming to beat Humans is a vast minority.
Sorry, but "we all" can also mean "majority". Not _everyone_. Any statement with "All" or "Always" and such would likely have at least one exception. It is a term just like "zillions" that is not a real number but means "a bunch".
You don't seem to be in touch with reality at all. In the other thread I already introduced the term "solipsistic reality" for this, and this is another clear example.
Right. And just like the roof, once again my point goes right over your head and is missed...
