On May 1, 5:33 am, Martin Brown
wrote:

That its shape broadly correlates with the rms error graph of the
players lends credence to the possibility that Crafty might have been
adequate for the task.

Q: How would you like it if we were to assign a player weaker
than you to "rate" your games, to assess your play and compare
it to that of your peers? I suspect your gut reaction would be to
object on the basis that a weaker player is not qualified for the
job, and indeed, it would be better to select the strongest player
available for this task.


And to be fair to the authors they did say that
others with access to the internals of stronger engines should repeat
their tests to see how they compare.

And, to be fair, it may well be determined that crippled-
Crafty wasn't quite up to the task of ranking moves in
perfect order. I expect is is up to the simpler task of
spotting tactical blunders, provided the 12 plys cutoff
did not account for tactical search extensions for
checks and captures.


I would have liked to see the rms error graph with blunders excluded.
That might have shed some more light.

According to what you say below, this would make
very little difference as the blunder rate is almost
infinitely small.



Capablanca maintained a blunder rate of 0.01% (1 blunder in every
10000 moves)

I don't believe that. If this were really true, then I
might go over all of his games and come up empty-
handed, having not seen enough moves to find the
one-in-ten thousand. In fact, knowing little of his
games I can easily recall a gross blunder without
any trouble, though it may or may not have
occurred in world championship play.


and the worst performer was Steinitz at 0.054% (blunder
every roughly every 2000 moves).

How about defining what you mean by "blunder"?


These are interesting numbers and
right at the limits of human error rates for purely trivial mechanical
tasks like punch key data entry.

Balderdash. Show me a data entry person who can
go 9,999 keystrokes without a blunder and I'll show
you a computerized robot/android! Back in the days
of punched cards, everything was run through twice,
the second time by a different operator, just to cut the
error rate down to size.


To put it into perspective commercial programming has an effective
error rate around 1-2% (and in some shops 10% is not unknown). Much
greater than 0.2% acheivable by the best formal development methods.
But competitive GM level chess is more than an order of magnitude more
accurate still.

I don't buy that. The articles I saw focused only on
world championship play, which likely has a lower
error rate because: 1) the players are the very best
in the world, and 2) the time controls and playing
conditions are close to ideal.

In any case, it is very difficult to have meaningful
discussion without a firm definition of what is to be
considered a blunder, and what not.

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