Re: [Bug-gnubg] Problem using command files for rollouts.

[Jim Segrave]

On Tue 25 Feb 2003 (17:46 +0100), Nis wrote:
> --On Tuesday, February 25, 2003 17:22 +0100 Jim Segrave <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> 
> > I would have thought that if I were running a command file with a few
> > rollouts in it, I'd like to be able to see what sort of progress it
> > was making - an untruncated rollout of 6 moves can take a couple of
> > days even on a 2.4G machine with lots of memory. Personally, I'd want
> > to see how far it had got and be able to estimate how long it would
> > take to complete and what sort of results it was showing (if it's
> > rolled out 400 games and the STD of the results is down around .0015,
> > I might decide to stop it there, even if it meant editing my command
> > file to start with the next position, rather than run another several
> > hours of rolling out a position which I think is already clearly
> > evaluated.
> 
> I don't know if this is in the wishlist already: "Rollout until certain". 
> This should probably be combined with a minimum and maximum number of 
> trials.

Would this be for a single rollout - where you'd say something like
minimum 100, max 2592, stop if STD < 0.01 * abs(equity)?
 
I would think this would be most useful when rolling out a set of
moves to decide which is the best move. In this case, some real
surgery is required, as you'd then want to stop when say x * JSD <
abs(equity of best play - equity of 2nd best play).

I have a feeling that this is what people would most often want. But
that means being able to stop and restart rollouts, so you'd do
something involving doing a block of rollouts of each candidate play,
eliminate any whose equity difference from the best so far is more
than x JSDs from the best play. Then do another block of rollouts of
the remaining candidates, continuing until either you've reached the
limit of rollouts or ou've eliminated all but one play. This requires
the ability to resume rollouts (which I'm working towards) and a
better view of what moves to roll out. At the moment, you can use the
hint or analysis window to get a list of moves, then select a block of
those (I don't think you can select non-adjacent ones for a single
rollout). After that the current code is very simple minded - roll
each selected move out to the limit. 

-- 
Jim Segrave           address@hidden