On May 10, 5:03 pm, Ron wrote:
In article .com,

raylopez99 wrote:
Yes, agreed. As I posted 47.5 posts ago, for very close, nearly tied
rankings, the stronger chess program might make a difference. But for
clear demarcation breakpoints, such as between Capa and Kramnik versus
Karpov and Kasparov, a stronger chess engine doesn't matter.

It appears, RayLopez, that you missed an earlier post of mine which had
two questions related to this very point.

Since I'm sure it was an innocent omission - it's easy to miss a single
post in a long thread, I'll repeat the questions here.

1) Would you feel equally confident if we only gave crafty 11 ply? 10?
8? 4? Where do you draw the line? What non-arbitrary criteria are you
using to suggest that 12-ply is meaningful whereas 3 ply, obviously,
would not be?

2) What objective criteria are you using to define "extremely close"
such that you don't trust the computer's ability to rank players
properly?

I'm very curious to hear your answers to these questions.

-Ron

Ron,

Don't confuse the PSEUDO-chess scientists and programmers answers on
this thread with REAL answers. Keep in mind I program as a hobby,
have an IQ of over 140, and am a successful and quite wealthy
businessman. My opponents *think* they have something to offer, but
they don't realize that AI (Artificial Intelligence) research has
largely abandoned chess as the experimental "fruit fly" of AI, roughly
15 years ago. Bridge and GO are the hot areas where AI is being now
applied, not to mention the quest to build a true Turing machine that
passes the Turning Test.

Another point: my opponents *think* they know the answer, but what is
their basis? Little better than a guess. In fact, little better than
my guess. But at least I base my guess/ hypothesis on having studied
chess and chess programmers as far back as 1990. I used to subscribe
to Ply mag, published by an outfit in Canada (some university up
there), and have read articles and papers on how real chess
programming works. My opponents are still upset Garry lost to Deep
Blue 2, and are 'fighting for the human race' or some such nonsense.

Now to get to the point of your questions: I don't know. My
intuition, like Bot states, says that ply will not matter unless
players are "close", and from a visual inspection of the ratings in
the summary of the original article that started this thread shows,
"close" is between Capa and Kramnik, Karpov and Kasparov, and then the
"third tier". But more plies might not make a difference (that is,
won't change the relative rating) between say Capa and Kasparov, or
anybody in the third tier vs. Karpov, etc.

In truth, nobody in this thread really knows, and indeed further
research is needed. But the burden of persuasion is on Camp #1 to
make their case--that so called "positional sacrifice" positions are
rather common in a game of chess and that chess is NOT largely tactics
(these are the assumptions behind their claims--I claim the
contrary). History has shown otherwise. Indeed, on the last point,
Kramnik missed a mate in one last year. Chess is largely tactics, and
that's why it is fair to have a chess engine rate the champions. You
can make 30 brilliant "deep" positional moves in chess, have a clearly
winning position, and still lose a chess game in a mate in one. That
is chess. A PC would score you poorly in such a game, even though you
were "brilliant" up until your blunder (and perhaps unappreciated by
the PC, though I have argued in this thread that PCs are in fact not
so bad at rating positions that require positional moves, even
exchange sacs).

In fact, Camp #1's arguments are better if we were trying to rate
"correspondence chess" champions rather than OTB champions, since in
correspondence chess tactics are much less important than deep
positional moves. But that was not the inquiry of the original
article ranking of champions: it was for OTB world championship play.
However, that said, I would not be surprised that even for
correspondence chess players, rating such players with Fritz 5.31 at 5
seconds a move would give you a pretty clear indication of the best
correspondence chess players, since good positional moves and good
tactical moves are largely one and the same in chess (again, this goes
to chess being 99% tactics).

RL