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H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Mar 9 06:12 PM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from 03:29 PM:

Well, from what you say it appears that with 'computer study' you mean statistical data from games that computers played against each other (or themselves). As I would. But as I said, the B = N observation came from the Kaufman study, which was nothing of the sort. He just filtered positions with a B-vs-N imbalance from a huge database of human GM games, selecting those that were the imbalance was stable for some number of moves (to weed out tactics in progress), and counted the number of wins, draws and losses in which these games ended. Which apparently was a 50% score.

It doesn't sound like rocket science to me, but I suppose a complete idiot could bungle even the most simple tasks. And I have met other chess-engine programmers that have done similar things for themselves. (The Kaufman study did not publish more specific things, like how the N or B would do against Rooks, or whether the difference also correlates with the presence of other pieces than Pawns, and some programmers want to make their engines aware of that too, and put a complete table of every conceivable material compustion in their engine.) And they never told me they had proven Kaufman wrong.

The problem is that implying someone is a bungling idiot that even cannot do the simplest thing right, or a fraud who intentionally publishes falsehoods, is a pretty heavy accusation. Most people would hesitate to make such an accusation without having very solid evidence that the published results were indeed wrong. "It was not checked by anyone, so it must be wrong" is not really a valid line of reasoning.

You seem to have a wrong impression of the peer-review system. The 'peers' that are asked to referee a scientific publication will NOT redo the reported work. They only judge whether the described method according to which the results were obtained is a proper procedure. If the claims are in contradiction with earlier results the referees have a hard time. They would at the very least insist that the authors of the new manuscript give an explanation for why their method would be more reliable than what people previously did, and even then they stand a large probability of rejection if that doesn't convince the referees. In a sense everyone is a peer on the internet, and could have contested what others publish there, in particular the Kaufman results. But it didn't happen, and that means much more than when he would just had to fool one or two referees. And there isn't really any need for mathematicians, people that know how to count seem sufficient. You are aware that Larry Kaufman is a GM himself?

I don't really understand your third paragraph, but I am intrigued by the term "more knowledgeable". True knowledge should of course never be dismissed. But what knowledge are you talking about, here?

I agree the Amazon result is suspect; it was only based on a couple of hundred games where the Queen and a Knight where replaced by an Amazon, and the baseline pieces were shuffled to provide more game diversity. That is a very different story than GMs not being able to convert a B-N 'advantage' into a better result in a few thousand games. The remarkable thing about computer games is that it doesn't seem to matter much what the level of play is. Errors tend to cancel out, when both players make them. Even random movers systematically win more games when you give them stronger material. (Although quantitatively they don't make the most of that, as they too easily give the strong material away.)

Rather than describing the calculations in a large number of articles, which is likely to lead to a lot of duplication, you could make a separate article of it. That could lead to a more coherent presentation, and the other pages could then just refer to that.

 


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