Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 04:43:49 02/19/05
Go up one level in this thread
On February 17, 2005 at 14:03:30, Tord Romstad wrote: Don't do idiot experiments that just support the idiocy you invented yourself. IF you have an engine rated 3000 in strength THEN it will play virtually achieve 2300 in the important games instead of 3000 when NOT using a book. So the book delivers 700 rating points. Experiments with some idiot engine that is itself rated what is it, 2200, will be useless of course. Some years ago when engines were 2200 level it was the Mchess-Necchi team who said a book was worth 300, and he meant that obviously in the same way as i mean the 700 points at real high level. The weakest link is what counts. I don't care for your engine in that respect, let alone such stupid experiment. Take a strong engine from which you feel it is the best engine in the world. Show up without book in important events. World champ will be the best test. THEN calculate after a 100 years of doing that, what the odds were you won that event. You will see it's 0%. 750 rating points is roughly meaning that a person A has 0% chance against person B. What i'm saying is that not using a book versus an excellent book is making that difference true. 700 rating points. Not a point less. Vincent >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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