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I've been watching TCEC this week - the chess world championship for computers. The joint #1 engine, Stockfish, has had a series of embarrassing losses to Gull
by alextgordon 12y ago
I've been watching TCEC this week - the chess world championship for computers.
The joint #1 engine, Stockfish, has had a series of embarrassing losses to Gull, a much inferior engine. Everybody was convinced that Stockfish was surely broken because its level of play was so poor.
Then suddenly, in the last couple of days, it has turned itself around. After a series of wins it's only half a point off the top spot (if it draws the current game).
Here's the thing: nothing changed. It's the same code, the same algorithms, the same build. That bad run it had was just bad luck, there was never anything wrong with it.
An excess of information can absolutely be a force for ignorance. People will see patterns even when none exist. Often the only way to stop people from misinterpreting data is to not have any data at all.
If people can be so easily mislead by the fortunes of an unchangingly consistent algorithm, just think how destructive data on surgeons could be.
- lucio 12y agoquestion: bad luck in chess? I do not get it. Maybe I'm simplifying, but the program which gets deeper in the movement tree, should always win.
- shadowfox 12y ago> but the program which gets deeper in the movement tree, should always win It doesn't always work like that. Usually, since examining, the whole move tree is very expensive, heuristics tend to kick in at various points providing assessments for positions (thus helping to prune the tree). It is quite possible to land in a position where your set of heuristics is not quite right.
- peterfirefly 12y agoThe decision tree is enormous. One of the ways one can cope with that is to sample it, i.e. use randomness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search
- grkvlt 12y agoAside - I'm very surprised that this comment got enough downvotes to gray it out. It's sad that someone asking an honest question (and I had the same thought occur to me as well) about a seemingly strange result loses karma for it, when this sort of debate is what should be being encouraged. Fortunately there are a couple of replies that do explain why randomness and luck are a factor in computer chess programming...