On May 1, 11:25 am, JohnnyT wrote:

Usually moves where engines evaluations radically disagree are well
worth investigating to see why.

This is a worry, but you really need to play with Rybka some, to
understand what I am saying. You need to follow several games with
Rybka and your engine of choice. You will find numerous positions
where the programs will disagree violently (over 100cp) over the
favorite moves. (Realize that many times it is not that different).

It is precisely that difference where "strength" lies. Different
engines simply do not come up with the same moves given enough time.
Rybka seems to dramatically show that, and it is dramatically stronger.

I don't have a working copy of Rybka, but I went over the
articles at the Web site and found some examples of what
you are saying there.

In one game, it was shown that a game between GMs
Kasparov and Anand, along with others which soon
followed that one, wrongly assessed a very simple
line involving -- ...O-O, B-h6 threatening mate, ...g6, Bxf8
winning the exchange -- which was rejected outright by
all the human GMs and by other programs, with one
exception (Rybka). For this discussion, Rybka would
have been penalysed by crippled-Crafty for being the
only one strong enough to correctly evaluate this
exchange sacrifice! LOL


That alone should provide enough of a question as to the results here.
The fact is that we don't know when the engines will be strong enough to
represent the "truth".

There may not be a "the truth" to be found...only successive
approximations to it given our computational limitations. Like
peeling an onion each time you make the engines an order of magnitude
more powerful or add enhanced heuristics you allow deeper searching of
the game tree that may alter the outcome. However, we have now crossed
the point where the best computer programs are demonstrably better at
match play than humans.

This in no way demonstrates that crippled-Crafty is
capable of correctly scoring the moves from W.C.
games. The fact is, chess programs are superior
not because they are always right about move
scoring, but because when humans are wrong, they
are usually fatally so. Take the recent match
where world champion Kramnik overlooked a mate
on the move, for instance (something no program
does); there is no fighting one's way back after
this typically human error.



Don't let physics get into the way. We will probably be storing stuff
into the strings by then!

It is not physics that gets in the way here, but human
ignorance and stubbornness. I am already working on
a process to store the fifteen man table bases inside
Alpha Centuri, although there are still some technical
difficulties in retrieval times... . ;D

-- help bot