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Subject: Re: Hello from Edmonton (and on Temporal Differences)

Author: Jay Scott

Date: 14:49:05 07/31/02

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On July 30, 2002 at 22:43:36, James Swafford wrote:

>why isn't
>everyone doing it??

In my view, it's because top chess programmers are amazingly conservative. Or to
look at it more positively, they have a lot of time invested in and knowledge
gained about their traditional manual methods, and they do not believe in making
big changes. It's hard to argue with success!

Over the years I've posted a bunch of machine learning suggestions (few of them
original to me) to rec.games.chess.computer and to this forum. Maybe it's my
writing style or something, but in every single case the general first reaction
was to ignore or dismiss the idea. That happened even when I pushed opening book
learning, which was not used in chess programs at the time but has become common
since. Arthur Samuels' classic checkers program already used a similar kind of
rote learning, so nobody should call it a radical new idea, but despite
seemingly obvious advantages it somehow took decades to show up in chess
programs.

Another problem is that many of the people who've played around with learning
algorithms were only playing around. It takes serious knowledge to create a good
learning program, and different serious knowledge to create a good playing
program, and you have to have both to get really impressive results. Nobody's
done it yet.

My advice for those who have great new ideas: Implement them yourself and become
a smashing success. *That's* convincing. The only problem is that to become a
smashing success, you'll also have to implement a lot of great old ideas.



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