"Dr A. N. Walker" wrote in message
...
In article om,
help bot wrote:

Yes, I am. (As far as I can see, any bum off the
street could read their paper, copy their methods,
and by simply setting Crafty to *13 plys*, best their
results in terms of quality).

So? That [mutatis mutandis] applies to a very large
number, perhaps the majority, of scientific papers. We all
have to take decisions about how much computer time or other
resource it is worth pouring in to some experiment. Crafty13
would have occupied their roomful of computers for several
months, and would *probably* not have shown anything new.
If you, or anyone else, think that Rybka or some other engine
[inc Crafty13] would show different results, then you have
enough information to "copy their methods" and "best their
results". Go ahead. My expectation is that you will get the
same results, to good approximation. If so, then you will
have confirmed to each other than the methodology is doing
something objective, even if not what G&B claim. If not,
then you can publish a paper [or at least a letter in ICGAJ]
showing that G&B are wrong, and gain credit for it.

If you are proposing a methodology (ranking players
according to move analysis), you can't simply
pull an algorithm out of thin air and pretend that it means
something. The burden is on the authors to *show* that
it is meaningful. *They* should have done (at least partial)
analyses at much deeper ply, or on weaker players (if
computational time was severely limited), if they want
their method to have any credibility. They should
also have looked for the correspondence with this
ranking method and alternate ranking methods (e.g. ELO)
especially in those cases where the alternate method
has a high degree of credibility (contemporary players
playing actively in a pool)

The two most basic questions anyone should have
upon reading this work are 1. How many moves do
you need to analzye? 2. How deeply do you need
to analyze them? Neither are addressed by the paper
in any meaningful way. There is no way that that
can be characterized as anything other than a serious
defect. The excuse that it might have been hard to
address (which I don't believe, by the way) is
no excuse at all.