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

Author: James Swafford

Date: 19:12:27 08/01/02

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You're serious? :)

I just got home from Edmonton.  Let me think on this...
Six months is definitely not doable.  I graduate in December,
and I've gotta hella course load this Fall.  But I might
consider a 12 month wager.

If you're serious, let me know, and then let me think on it
for a day or two. I don't know if I want to take your money yet.
(Are you talking about "Amateur" ?)

And yeah, I think open source is fine.

--
James

BTW... how big is your family? :))


On July 31, 2002 at 23:38:56, Will Singleton wrote:

>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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