Author: Uri Blass
Date: 23:14:15 02/17/05
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On February 18, 2005 at 01:49:53, David Mitchell 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. > >Your test is so flawed in design, with almost no control factors in place, that >your conclusions are irrelevant, imo. > >Glaurung may lose 3:1 to Hiarcs for a huge number of reasons, or a mixture of >several. It may lose with it's book, for quite different reasons than it loses >when playing without it's book, to Hiarcs. It seems that you did not read Tord's post and surprisingly you are not the only one who did not read it. Glaurung was a constant opponent that always used book. The test was to test the value of hiarcs book and not the value of Glaurung's book. Ignore Glaurung that is not an important engine. The experiment results are simple Hiarcs with book beat opponent A 75:25 Hiarcs without book beat opponent A 72:28 You can say that one opponent may be misleading and you need many opponents to test the value of Hiarcs's book but it is clear that the value of Hiarcs book is not close to 700 elo. The value of book may be bigger in tournaments but I think that most people consider tournaments as not more important than other games so they do not do special preperation for tournament(of course I never make it lose on purpose but the games in CCT are not more important than other games as long as movei is an extremely weak engine that is probably even weaker than glaurung because it is near the level of gothmog and gothmog is weaker than glaurung based on Tord). The only reason that I played in tournament likw WCCC or CCT is simply because people asked me to play there. I am not playing to win(at least not in the near future) I already said that I do not think that movei is important when I considered to cancel my participation when one of the reason is that I did not make a significant improvement in movei and I did not consider the participation of it as important but people asked me to play inspite of it. Uri
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