Here's a chance to share an amusing and illustrative anecdote. I was working on optimizing "Goodbot", a program that plays Tantrix, and because of the nature of the game, the only way to really qualify an improvement is to run many test games against a standard opponent.
At one point, I was making nightly "test runs" of a few hundred games, with slightly tweaked parameters and underlying tweaks to the algorithms, always seeking to improve over the reference standard. At one point, I discovered that due to some temporary code accidentally left in place, I had actually been running exactly the same code for about a month, and all perceived movement in "better" or "worse" directions was only due to random fluctuations. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
