Milos wrote:
So I still don't understand why use a fully non-deterministic engine as your anchor when you can have equally weak engine that is fully deterministic?
Last comment and then I'm done.
You can't have a fully deterministic engine that is equally weak. Deterministic systems are subject to unexpected emergent properties which change depending on the inputs. Conway's Game of Life is an example of this. You change the starting point slightly and the behavior is completely different. It would be a non-trivial task to make sure a deterministic engine didn't have emergent behavior such as immediate 3-fold repetitions.
Unless you mean deterministic in the sense that pretty much every single-threaded engine that doesn't search based on time is completely deterministic.
Robert Pope wrote:But, the more times you flip a fair coin, the percent of times it lands heads will converge to 50% in the limit, which is equivalent to having the same elo.
Only true if your PRNG is ideal which is never the case.
Since the number of games you play is never infinite you will almost never have exactly equal score. And probability to have exactly equal score is reducing the more games you play.
On the other hand using fully deterministic engine as your anchor can reduce error margins by sqrt(2) the same effect as if you played only half of the games.
So I still don't understand why use a fully non-deterministic engine as your anchor when you can have equally weak engine that is fully deterministic?
That PRNG argument is a total red herring. The impact of a poor PRNG vs a perfect PRNG has literally no impact on how well a random mover will score.
True for random mover not true for coin. I quoted exactly your sentence regarding the coin. Maybe you should be more carefully when formulating statements.
Even worse, given two different deterministic engines, engine A may win 100% against B from the opening position, 30% from a random 2-move book, and 45% with a strong opening book. So what is their relative elo? A random mover doesn't suffer from the accidental biases that a deterministic mover would have.
That is real red herring. Could you actually support your belief that fully deterministic engine I proposed few posts before would suffer from accidental biases any more than a pure random mover?
OMG. It gets worse and worse. It's OBVIOUS. A random mover doesn't HAVE biases because it's RANDOM. The only bias comes from the quality of the PRNG, which is a trivial issue when you only use a few hundred random numbers per game. So by definition, your deterministic engine is going to have more biases.