Author: Uri Blass
Date: 14:48:18 02/17/05
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On February 17, 2005 at 14:42:41, Dan Honeycutt wrote: >On February 17, 2005 at 14:03:30, Tord Romstad wrote: > >>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 > >Hi Tord: > >I too think 700 is a number from the twilight zone. But the statement, IIRC, >was 700 points for a very good book vs no book. So you have to include the >possibility: > >c) Glaurung's book is no good. Glaurung's book is not the subject here. Tord simply comapred hiarcs book with no book. He let Glaurung with it's own book to play agaisnt Hiarcs with it's book and let Glaurung with it's own book play against Hiarcs with no book. Hiarcs with it's own book failed to perform even 100 elo better. Uri.
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