Author: Sune Fischer
Date: 11:15:57 02/17/05
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On February 17, 2005 at 14:03:30, Tord Romstad wrote: Well 700 Elo is equivalent to about 5-6 pawns material advantage, I don't think I have ever seen that in an actual game much less seen it on average. I can believe in a good book giving half a pawn or ~50 Elo, not much more than that is realistic IMO. Perhaps the person you refer to is talking about a book with "perfect chess" reaching 80 plies deep? :) -S. >A couple of days ago, a well-known programmer and regular >poster here on the CCC claimed that a good opening book >was worth at least 700 Elo points. I thought this number >looked completely outrageous, and decided to do a simple >experiment. > >I am the author of a basic and minimalistic UCI chess engine >called Glaurung. Source code and executables for Mac OS X, >Linux and Windows can be found at the following URL: > >http://www.math.uio.no/~romstad/glaurung/glaurung.html > >Recently, I have played some test matches with Glaurung >against the strongest engine I have on my compter: Hiarcs >9.6. Not surprisingly, all such matches end in crushing >victories for Hiarcs. The last match I played ended >75-25 in Hiarcs' favor. > >As a crude test of the "good book=700 Elo" claim, I have >now repeated the match with identical program versions >and conditions, except that Hiarcs was now playing without >an opening book. Assuming that Hiarcs' book is worth 700 >Elo, the expected result of this second match would be >something like 95-5 in _Glaurung's_ favor. > >The actual result of the second match was very close to >the first match: Hiarcs won by 72-28. > >As far as I can see, this means that at least one of the >following must be true: > >a) The statement "good book=700 Elo" is lightyears away >from the truth. > >b) Hiarcs has an extremely bad opening book, and with a >half decent opening book it would be several hundred >rating points ahead of Shredder. > > >Tord
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