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Let's Be Consistent -- An Error is an Error

Posted By: Steve Mellen
Date: Tuesday, 21 July 2009, at 12:32 a.m.

In Response To: Let's Be Consistent -- An Error is an Error (Bill Riles)

10 years from now some other bot will be putting GNU and Snowie to shame, even though everyone likes to treat today's rollout results (even for opening moves!) like they're the Word of God. But hey, if people really care about winning the award for "coming closest to playing exactly like whatever bot is in fashion in 2009" then I agree with you, we should measure precisely that, and not get involved in rationalizing deviations from the bot.

I think everyone would agree that if, like Ray, you have a "tell" that your opponent will pass, then of course it's not a mistake to pass. But the problem with saying "ok, I won't count that in my error rate" is easily demonstrated by looking at the reverse situation. Let's say Ray had NOT cubed that position, even though he knew or should have known that his opponent would make a huge blunder and drop. Wouldn't that be a big mistake on Ray's part, failing to win a free point? Yet I don't know anyone who looks at the bot results and says "ok, I made the bot's play here, but I'm going to ding myself anyway." In other words, taking human intuition into account can only make error rates go down, never up. Doesn't make much sense.

Of course, it's completely impossible to measure the issue I'm talking about. If I make a technically inferior play in order to complicate the game against a specific opponent, I can pretend like I made the technically correct play for purposes of the error rate. But if I made the technically correct play even though I should have made the complicating play against this opponent, how much equity did I give up? Impossible to say. The long and short of it is, I know why people want to remove certain technical errors from the calculation, but it's an invalid methodology that gives a distorted picture at the end of the day. They get to subtract out all sorts of blunders that the bot fails to understand, but they never add in new blunders that the bot also fails to understand!

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