Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 22:00:47 07/30/02
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On July 30, 2002 at 22:43:36, James Swafford wrote: >A natural follow up question (which I also asked) is -- then why isn't >everyone doing it?? My first thought on this is that the top chess engines already have their evaluation weights tuned very well. Perhaps not perfect. I think they are putting their efforts into more beneficial things. For example, if your evaluation function weights are 99% correct, then it's more beneficial to work on a new pruning technique or add new evaluation factors, but tuning that almost perfect evaluation function isn't going to produce any significant increases in playing strength. >Knightcap was strong, but it's >definitely not in the top tier. My thought on this is that just because an evaluation function's weights are tuned to 100% perfection, it doesn't mean the engine will be strong. Maybe you are evaluating the wrong things to begin with. If you only have material, mobility, and king safety, then I suspect there is only so much tuning you can do, and eventually you get optimal weights for each of those evaluation parameters. Just because those are perfect, it doesn't mean the engine will be among the top. If that program has a branching factor of 4, it's not likely that it will ever compete with Fritz, Tiger, Shredder, Junior, etc., all of which have much lower branching factors. I think that is the main reason why you don't see (or hear) about TD in computer chess very much. There are other things that will benefit the engine more. I would think that even when a programmer reaches the end of his "to do" list, that he would probably find it more beneficial to try and create completely new pruning methods from scratch than to spend time working on implementing TD evaluation tuning. Russell
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