On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Álvaro Begué <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Eric Baum <[email protected]> wrote: > > Don Dailey wrote: > >> > >> There have been several amazing breakthroughs in computer chess over the > >> years, so you don't know what you are talking about. You don't > really > >> believe we achieved several hundred ELO with only incremental > refinements do > >> you? > > > > OK, what are the several amazing breakthroughs? > > I'll start: > * Quiescence search > * Alpha-beta pruning > * Hash tables > * Null-move heuristic > Yes, and this just scratches the surface. It's easy to forget many of them because after some time passes we start thinking of them as "standard techniques", but when they were discovered they were quite important. * check extensions - we take this for granted now, but it was a breakthrough. * capture extensions. * checks in quies * Late Move Reductions. * evaluation by interpolation * endgame databases * futility pruning and razoring * internal iterative deepening * static exchange evaluation I could come up with a list of 20 or 30 more things that you might classify as either minor refinements, or major breakthrough's, it's a semantics thing so call them what you will. But I don't think you have a reasonable argument to classify many of these as minor refinements, such as check extensions, null move pruning, hash tables, pawn structure hashing, Late Move Reductions and so on. These are all big things and some of them, such as LMR are considered as not being very well understood yet. You can wallow in semantics and consider all of these things as just minor refinements to mini-max (I suppose you could classify alpha/beta pruning is a "minor" refinement of mini-max) but you miss the point. This same type of thing is what has been happening to GO all along. To see the progress you have to have some reasonable perspective. In the 60's this same kind of talk and limited perspective caused people to say chess playing programs would never even get close to master level - they only saw a huge problem that looked unsolvable. > _______________________________________________ > Computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go >
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