Re: [Bug-gnubg] grandmaster vs supremo

[Robert-Jan Veldhuizen]

On 1/11/07, Erfan Nourozi <address@hidden> wrote:

> hi im wondering which is a stronger player, grandmaster or supremo?

This has been discussed and tested very often at the GammOnLine forum.

It's hard to determine whether GNUBG 3-ply plays ("grandmaster")
better than GNUBG 2-ply ("supremo"). For moves where they differ, it's
definitely not so that 3-ply always picks the better move, in fact it
seems more like 50/50. That has probably to do with the fact that
GNUBG plays relatively better at even-ply than at odd-ply.

For a real test you'd need a huge sample of positions and since 3-ply
takes long to evaluate, this is a very time-intensive task.

For cube decisions, odd-ply usually plays worse than even-ply. For
most "real-life" positions, the 2-ply cube decision is better than the
3-ply one.

In general, my advice would be to just forget about 3-ply at all since
it takes a lot longer than 2-ply and it's not clear that it's any
better. For a real improvement over 2-ply you need 4-ply it seems (but
even then the improvement is very small, and the time cost is huge).

--
Robert-Jan Veldhuizen