On Apr 30, 2:44 pm, JohnnyT wrote:


I think this is important when looking at things like the computer
rankings so you can understand how measurably stronger than the field
Rybka is. And how far behind Crafty is is.

It is substantial, and gives tremendous credence to the argument that
the engine is substantially too weak to answer these questions in the
survey. Even if the questions are worth asking.

And I was just trying to add some anecdotal evidence that Fritz and
Rybka are often a 100cp apart in positions, and that value is not a
significant enough measure to say that Crafty is suitable. And that
indeed is even more weight that Crafty is unsuitable.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Once again you, and others like you, fail to understand what
normalization of results mean. You do not have to find the 'best'
chess program to rate human champions--as long as Crafty, a second or
third or fourth best chess playing program, or a not bad chess
program, scores everybody the same. That is normalization. In fact,
the biggest potential problem with Crafty is that (without knowing how
it works, I'm guessing) it might have a random number generator for
picking the best move out of a series of candidate moves that uses a
different 'seed' for the rand(), which means it might not score the
identical position the same way two times in a row, since it will pick
a slightly different move if the random number generating seed is
different (often this seed is the system clock, or the last keyboard
key the user pressed). One way to stop this in computer programming
is to make sure the 'seed' never changes. Without knowing how Crafty
is coded I can't tell you if this is an actual problem, but I sense
intutitvely that even if such a problem exists, most of the time it
won't make a big deal in the normalization since most of the time
candidate moves are reasonably close to one another in efficacy.

A larger question looms from this thread: have you people not learned
anything after nearly a generation of computer chess? That the 'puter
is never wrong? (with a few exceptions, that prove the rule) My gawd,
you people act like those philosophers in the 1960s that said
computers will never win in chess because a chess program cannot be
stronger than the person who wrote the program. Idiotcy! My next
thread will be cross-posted to alt.young-earth and alt.creationism if
this ignorance keeps up.

RL