Author: Will Singleton
Date: 20:38:56 07/31/02
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On July 31, 2002 at 21:33:29, James Swafford wrote: >On July 31, 2002 at 17:49:05, Jay Scott wrote: > >>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. > >I agree with you. I have studied TD-Leaf for a while, and I am definitely >going to pursue creating a strong TD chess player. > >One of my biggest concerns was the time to train a complex evaluator. >I spoke with Rich Sutton about this today, and he convinced me that it's >doable. > >-- >James James, From my work with checkers, chess and td algorithms, I would have to disagree. I would be thrilled to be proven wrong, but there's better ways to do chess than td learning. At least for the present. I suspect it will be a interesting experiment, though. I'll offer a proposition. I'm working on a new program based on standard, well-known techniques. I assume from your comments that you are working on a TD chess player. Six months from now, let's have a match, open source code. Loser pays for winner's trip (incl family, round-trip) to loser's home city for dinner and drinks. How about it? Will
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