4 ms·
Surprised it didn’t mention until the very end, but since chess is deterministic, there is no objective probability. Every position is objectively plus infinit
by paulddraper 8mo ago
Surprised it didn’t mention until the very end, but since chess is deterministic, there is no objective probability.
Every position is objectively plus infinity, minus infinity, or zero.
The “advantage” is an engine-specific notion that helps prune search paths.
Some chess engines don’t even evaluate an advantage.
- kuboble 8mo agoThere are also objective measures for more fine position evaluation. For winning/drawn positions: "What is the smallest program that can guarantee your side to win/draw" probably adding some time constraint.
- jmount 8mo agoThat is a neat variation.
- im3w1l 8mo agoI think program size is probably not a good measure since any heuristic you can put in could be discovered at runtime with a metaheuristic that searches for good heuristics. Time and memory make more sense.
- paulddraper 8mo agoMeasuring the size of a model that produces a win? Theoretically valid, but that's not going to be a very useful/diable.
- kuboble 8mo agoNo, but in practice centipawns reported by the imperfect engine are good. But I want to point out that in theory there is also something more than pure win/ lose/ draw with prefect play.
- TZubiri 8mo agoNot only it is mentioned, but it's mentioned that it was mentioned as early as 1950, by none other than Claude Shannon: >""under perfect play all chess games be a the same single one outcome of the following (we just currently don’t know which one, “A” playing the white pieces): Mr. A says, “I resign” or Mr. B says, “I resign” or Mr. A says, “I offer a draw,” and Mr. B replies, “I accept"
- monktastic1 8mo agoYes, this is a huge omission, because it means that as engines improve, the stated advantage becomes increasingly meaningless to humans (which is the opposite of what we may intuitively expect). What I really want to know as a player is how easy it will be for me to win from this position against someone of my opponent's strength, which is admittedly a very hard thing to define, let alone compute.
- TurdF3rguson 8mo agoHow likely you mean. It's the same effort to win a game as to lose a game.
- janalsncm 8mo agoYeah it’s confusing because there are really three “evaluations” you could have for a position 1) god-mode 1/0/-1 which you could argue is the “true” position 2) engine centipawns which help the search algorithm 3) human evaluation which would distinguish between two positions in terms of a subjective difficulty For example, two positions might be 0.0 on the eval bar but one position is an obvious draw and in the other position one player has to walk a tightrope of precise moves to draw. Just because that’s obvious to a computer doesn’t mean a human can easily draw the second position.