fkarger wrote: ↑Sun Jun 15, 2025 9:03 am
What does it mean if a player shows noisy behavior in a position with a single solution?
It indicates that the player doesn’t fully understand the position, because otherwise, they would always play the best move.
The player is either too weak, or the position is too demanding.
Ok.
If we only had mate-in-one problems, there would be no noise, but also no real challenge.
Here, “noise” essentially means “high difficulty” or, in other words, a significant challenge.
No, Frank.
As for mate in x- puzzles, there's always (added to the task of finding best move) only one exactly correct solution: the best DTM.
If it's too difficult for a human player or an engine, to find this correct best distand to mate, the position is too difficult as for the given time (and player or engine and hardware). If an engine finds the best move and get's any DTM- output, that shows, that the engine found some kind of more or less nearness to correct answer, you can let a tool or GUI judge the position solved, or you can let it be judged as not solved, as long as the DTM isn't the exactly correct one.
As for the 80 positions (81-160), tbs show the correct solutions at once (if at least DTZ is stored and read correctly by GUI or engine) a move is chosen, and a winning or drawing (if not losing for fully wrons move or) eval is given. You can be satisfied with the move- choice, but then you yet have to accept the so called wrong reasons for it. With more or less good or bad luck, with the bigger chance of sometimes finding and sometimes not, the bigger the random- noise get's even for this minimal (by GUI or tool judged) requirement of finding best move.
What DTM was for mate in x- puzzles (which therefore also are not coercively good to be used for single best move suites neither) was DTZ for your tbs- postions to be solved by engines without using tbs (that are more or less standard in engine- tests, at least in game playing with at least 5-6 men Syzygys). As near together win and cursed win of these 80 positions are, engine would have to calculate almost 50 moves always, that it's not to be expected, engine separates DTZ of 49 to that of 50 for such non- trivial positions, you see with Stockfish with LTC and SMP on good hardware, all the in 5 minutes with 30 threads and 32G hash found solutions I gave output- examples of above out of the 54 positions from 106-160, had clearly drawing evals except a sinlge one with somewhat in between winning or drawing, none of the found solutions were seen by the engines as the single winning game changer it was, in MultiPV=2 the distinction of next best move as for its eval always was tight.
Of course you need not care about that all, if you don't as for other single best move positions you use for suites, yet you should for all of these yet too, if you'd want to know, how big the chance might be for certain positions, the solution might be found by a sinlge one tested engine in a single run (or in several ones) with a single hardware- TC often or sometimes or never.
Now let's have once again a closer look at the 18(19) positions, SF dev. 250602 solved out of the 80 (nr. 81-160) in two runs with 8 threads, 8G hash and 3 minutes per position, as evaluated by EloStatTS above. If you don't care for the relationship between difference in performane compared between the two runs and compared to the error bars EloStatTS gives, here I listed all the solutions, that were found in the first run (R1) and those in the second one (R2):
Code: Select all
R1 benath:
81 82 84 86 88 89 90 93 96 99 110 116 129 141 142 147 149 150
81 82 83 84 89 91 96 99 100 106 110 116 120 141 142 143 147 149 150
R2 above
Congruent: 81 82 84 89 96 99 141 142 147 149 150
Still I can show the complete lists of solutions with time- measurements, if there's more interest in that but in the summary above, but what does this table mean?
Out of the 19(18) in both runs found solutions, just 11 were found in both. So the chance, the one and the same engine with the same hardware- time was almost only (just a little more than) 50-50 to find or not find one of those, that were found at least in one of them.
Disregard the low number of solutions found all in all, disregard the for all found ones wrong reasons (as for mate in x- puzzles correct DTM would have to fit, here "only" win or draw should be separated, but that in this case it's separated by a few plies out of 100 only, that's the crux, so exact DTZ would give the only one correct solution anyhow compared to mate in x, you ask about the same exact answer you can ask for in DTM but don't ask for as for best move only, here it's the same quest like DTM would be, you just don't admit it, pretending it's "only" best move, that's searched for
), yet disregarding all these "sophisms", that you get a very low number of solutions out of a low number of positions and out of these low number of solutions, there's still an almost 50-50 chance only (in these two runs with this engine and hardware- TC), that one and the same correct (not as for the reasons of finding them, but as for the move- choice only) solution is found with (at least, nobody without many more runs can know, how many of those found in two runs would be found in many runs still) about a 50- 50 (ok., 11-18) chance of pure accident, this simple fact you simply shouldn't ignore, I'd say.
Sorry for being so detailed again and again, in CSS I even answered your latest posting to me also one more time, but if you don't want me to go on like this, simply just don't go on telling me, why I'm wrong as for you pov, otherwise I simply cannot resist telling you my pov detailed again neither, or as they say, sorry, could not resist...
Peter.
