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Disagree with Stick's Book Review

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Sunday, 12 December 2010, at 12:16 a.m.

In Response To: Disagree with Stick's Book Review (Daniel Murphy)

As far as the details of XG versus GNU, I think you already dug up the articles where I posted what I knew about them, so I don't think I have anything to contribute to that technical discussion. If you really want to know, you should contact Xavier directly and maybe post to the bug-gnubg mailing list.

You wrote:

For example, I think most everyone here will agree that not counting forced moves is better than counting them.

Well, I don't agree. First of all, better for what purpose? As you yourself pointed out, for the purposes of tracking one's own progress and getting a warm fuzzy feeling inside, all that really matters is that "lower is better." For this purpose, error rates are not really meaningful unless averaged over a large number of matches, and then my guess is that all the systems are pretty close to being equivalent, differing by some constant scale factor.

Doug Zare may have been the first to point out that whether you count forced moves or not can bias the measure according to your style of play. Two players of approximately equal strength but significantly different styles might have significantly different numbers of forced moves in their matches. Which of these players should be considered the "better" player?

Error rate, especially when calibrated according to EMG, is just a form of entertainment. As such, no system is inherently better than any other. De gustibus non est disputandum.

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