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[Bug-gnubg] Importance of pipcount
From: |
kvandoel |
Subject: |
[Bug-gnubg] Importance of pipcount |
Date: |
Sun, 23 May 2004 18:45:10 +0200 (CEST) |
On Sun, 23 May 2004, Albert Silver wrote:
> > The small effect of cube errors on overall performance allso gives
> an
> > interesting perspective on the so-called "pip-counting" methods.
> It
> > follows that for almost everyone, learning to accurately pip-count is
> a
> > complete waste of time.
> That's a very mistaken assumption IMO. You're assuming that the
> pip-count is only of use, or mostly of use, for cube decisions, and
> while it is certainly an unquestionable factor, it also *strongly*
> affects many checker play decisions.
I had thought of this and my handwaving argument against it is:
a) For cube decisions one OCCASIONALLY benefits from knowing the precise
pipcount.
b) For chequer play decisions one OCCASIONALLY benefits from
knowing the precise pipcount.
>From a) only pipcount would be even less imporant than cube decisions as
it is a subset of those. b) Compensates this a bit in the other
directions making it overall still less important than the cube
decisions.
It's easy to come up with positions where it's important; the question
is how often do they arise in practice? My personal experience is that
it is so infrequent that the effect on playing strength will be very
small. But this is just based on my own experience.
If you have a different experience I will have to change my opinion on
this.
I actually toyed with the idea of testing it out by hacking GNUBG to get
a wrong pipcount input to its neural net and letting it play against a
non-disabled version of itself and measure the effect. The thought of
subjecting myself to another smear campaign by Douglas Zare made me
change my mind if I remember correctly.
Kees