jp wrote: ↑Sat Feb 29, 2020 8:12 am
Some time into the game against Harvey, you went into lockdown, apparently because you were surprised by his move. (Obviously Harvey is not an unassisted engine, but let's state the obvious, so the discussion doesn't go on some crazy sidetrack.) What did you discover in lockdown, what did you change because of it, etc.?
I came up with an analysis method that played all of his moves in reasonable time, and used it to predict most of his moves for the rest of the game (and for the positions where he deviated, the moves I wrongly predicted would have been enough to defeat me). That's what happens when I play a superior opponent, they play a move I missed, if it's superior than the one I expected I try to come up with something that would play that move and previous moves, and then use that to predict what they would play for the rest of the game.
I have assimilated them by being able to predict them, and then I can use those methods against someone else. In this very game against mmt I played 19...Rb8 because that's the move I'd have predicted from Harvey (if I was white and was playing him I'd have predicted 19...Rb8), if the games happened in a different order and I didn't opponent model Harvey, I'd probably would have gone with 19...Rb7.
You'll see several of my opponents mention on further games that I'm playing much stronger than in our first game, because after having assimilated them I know how they play, and I'm usually able to beat them after a long stretch of games. On the ICCF one mostly plays an opponent once in a lifetime, or games happen simultaneously (one with white and one with black) so I don't get the chance for this, but otherwise I'm able to adapt against a specific opponent and exploit their weaknesses. This is a reason I often want to play black first on a series of games (I do the assimilation as black on the first game and beat them on the second with assimilation+white.)
I'm the result of assimilating all the superior opponents of the past and having analysis methods that mimic their stronger moves, regardless of hardware, so that's why I can boldly claim that my hardware suffices, I have yet to see a move that I couldn't find in reasonable time with it.