Skip Navigation


The Computer Journal Advance Access originally published online on June 14, 2007
The Computer Journal 2007 50(5):567-573; doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxm025
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
50/5/567    most recent
bxm025v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Levene, M.
Right arrow Articles by Bar-Ilan, J.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Comparing Typical Opening Move Choices Made by Humans and Chess Engines

Mark Levene1,* and Judit Bar-Ilan2

1 School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck College, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, UK
2 Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

* Corresponding author: mlevene{at}dcs.bbk.ac.uk

Received 4 January 2007; revised 24 April 2007

The opening book is an important component of a chess engine, and thus computer chess programmers have been developing automated methods to improve the quality of their books. For chess, which has a very rich opening theory, large databases of high-quality games can be used as the basis of an opening book, from which statistics relating to move choices from given positions can be collected. In order to find out whether the opening books used by modern chess engines in machine versus machine competitions are ‘comparable’ to those used by chess players in human versus human competitions, we carried out analysis on 26 test positions using statistics from two opening books: one compiled from humans' games and the other from machines' games. Our analysis using several nonparametric measures shows that, overall, there is a strong association between humans' and machines' choices of opening moves when using a book to guide their choices.

Key Words: computer chess • chess engines • opening book • man versus machine • nonparametric association measures


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.