Luke skywalker has done it again.

[mcostalba]

This whole thing comes down to the validity of the assumption that if Rybka scores 5.12 or more, it is a win with 99.99999999% certainty and that it follows that this happens to be the same certainty for the entire results.

Don, this is clearly a 1st April joke. The whole thing comes down to the fact that starting from the finachetto position he searched so deep to reach a PV with alpha set at almost +5.12, this is clearly non-sense. I am surprised that a developer falls this trap. I can understand people from main forum, but a developer should not be joked with something like this

[Terry McCracken]

You read too much into what I said, Don.

[JuLieN]

[moderation]
I sanitized the Luke Skywalker thread by moving all the hijacked part dealing with the Rybka/ICGA/Clones discussion to Engines Origins.
Please (especially Vincent) have these discussions there and don't hijack threads, thank you.
[/moderation]

[Mark Mason]

Well anyway....just in case anyone hasn't yet spotted it today.Chessbase have officially admitted it was all a joke which we all knew anyway:

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8051

[diep]

[moderation]
I sanitized the Luke Skywalker thread by moving all the hijacked part dealing with the Rybka/ICGA/Clones discussion to Engines Origins.
Please (especially Vincent) have these discussions there and don't hijack threads, thank you.
[/moderation]

You are unwilling to hear the truth about Vasik?

You realize that by doing these actions you keep feeding the lies that are there.

[JuLieN]

[moderation]
I sanitized the Luke Skywalker thread by moving all the hijacked part dealing with the Rybka/ICGA/Clones discussion to Engines Origins.
Please (especially Vincent) have these discussions there and don't hijack threads, thank you.
[/moderation]

You are unwilling to hear the truth about Vasik?

You realize that by doing these actions you keep feeding the lies that are there.

Yes I am. I am willing to ear any "truth" you want, Vincent. But in Engines Origins, thank you.

The current thread deals with ChessBase's April fool's joke: don't hijack it.

[Albert Silver]

Well anyway....just in case anyone hasn't yet spotted it today.Chessbase have officially admitted it was all a joke which we all knew anyway:

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8051

Well, I pretty much said as much in page one of this thread, without spelling it out.

[gerold]

Well anyway....just in case anyone hasn't yet spotted it today.Chessbase have officially admitted it was all a joke which we all knew anyway:

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8051

Well, I pretty much said as much in page one of this thread, without spelling it out.

I though it was real when first posted. But wondered how strange and stupid could one man and chessbase be. :_) . Well considering the source hum.............................

[Daniel Shawul]

The funniest way one guy figured it out
"That can't be a geek's wife so it is the april fools joke"

For me it was the consecuative "chess + billiards" and the "futuristic let's check" articles that alerted me. No idea about pogo pogo though. Well played chessbase!

[Rein Halbersma]

Apart from the lame April fools date obfuscation in the piece, the actual numbers already made the story incredible without reading further!

First, the solution space of checkers was 10^22 (the search space was 10^40), which was reduced to 10^14 by a bidirectional search. The back-end search built 10^14 database positions, and the front-end search built 10^14 opening positions. Schaeffer (http://ilk.uvt.nl/icga/journal/pdf/toc30-4.pdf) estimates it would take 200 core years to re-create this solution. Second, Schaeffer also estimates that the solution space for chess is about the square of that of checkers.

How does Vas's claim stack up against this? Hm, about 10 times the computing power but about the square of the search space (10^80 vs 10^40). Being liberal, let's suppose the actual solution space is the square root of that (10^40). However, the efficient bidirectional search (giving almost another square root reduction), was dependent on 10-piece databases which were already reachable from shallow root searches. Without the equivalent chess databases, the 10^40 solution space will not be reduced by another square root. And covering 26 orders of magnitude with 10 times more computing power...

BTW, the way checkers was solved by Schaeffer et al. was by iterating over the threshold value. So a real proof would take the 5.12 as the first step in such an iteration, and stepwise increase it all the way to a mate score.

So the joke is exposed by the man himself using a similar argument as above:

http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8051
"we're still probably a good 25 or so orders of magnitude away from being able to solve something like the King's Gambit."