Re: current development

[Timothy Y. Chow]

On Sun, 8 Dec 2019, Joseph Heled wrote:
> Yes. But there is the question of how easy it is to "navigate" to those 
> positions. can you reliably get to those positions against a bot and win 
> from their ignorance?I have my doubts.

I've done some experimentation of this sort, but rather than quote my own 
experience, I'll point you to reports by people who have spent more time 
on this than I have.  BGOnline is having some server problems, but I think 
these links should work:

http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?read=129969
http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?read=54183

The upshot is that GNU 2-ply (version 0.xx) or XG 3-ply (version 1) is 
reportedly exploitable in this manner, if you play money games with an 
unlimited cube.  Stronger settings are reportedly harder to exploit, but 
maybe not impossible.

In any case, as I said earlier, in my opinion this line of investigation 
is not really the most interesting one.  IMO the closeness of a bot to 
perfection should be measured not just by its performance from the 
standard starting position, but from *any* position that could legally 
arise in a game.  The reason is that in practice, bots are used to analyze 
positions that arise in actual games.  It's obviously a logical error to 
conclude that the bot's analysis of an arbitrary position is sound just 
because it plays well from the starting position, but I'm surprised to see 
how often I see people implicitly making this error.

Tim