Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 11:23:20 02/17/05
Go up one level in this thread
On February 17, 2005 at 14:15:57, Sune Fischer wrote: >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. No, the person he is talking about simply lives in an alternate universe where our normal rules of physics and math do not apply... I don't see why anyone would even bother participating in that particular discussion, much less running tests. I claim that water freezes at 12.7C, who is going to run a detailed test to see if that is right or not? Or is common sense enough? :) > >>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
This page took 0.02 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.