Correction: Technical Report on RL and chess.

[Jonathan Baxter]

Whoops!

My posting last night contained the wrong ftp address. The right one
is included below. Also there was an incorrect link in the web
page. Thanks to all those who pointed this out. Sorry for the
inconvenience. 

Cheers,

Jon
-------------
Jonathan Baxter	
Research Fellow
Department of Systems Engineering
Research School of Information Science and Engineering
Australian National University
http://keating.anu.edu.au/~jon
Tel: +61 2 6279 8678
Fax: +61 2 6279 8688

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Technical Report Available
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Title
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KnightCap: A chess program that learns by combining TD($\lambda$) with
minimax search. 

Authors
-------
Jonathan Baxter, Andrew Tridgell and Lex Weaver.

Department of Systems Engineering and Department of Computer Science,
Australian National University.

Abstract 
------- 
In this paper we present TDLeaf($\lambda$), a variation on the
TD($\lambda$) algorithm that enables it to be used in conjunction with
minimax search. We present some experiments in which our chess
program, ``KnightCap,'' used TDLeaf($\lambda$) to learn its evaluation
function while playing on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS,
fics.onenet.net). It improved from a 1650 rating to a 2100 rating in
just 308 games and 3 days of play (equivalent to improving from
mediocre to expert for a human).  A more recent version of KnightCap
is currently playing on the "Non-Free" Internet Chess Server
(ICC, chessclub.com) with a rating of around 2500. We discuss some of the
reasons for this success and also the relationship between our results
and Tesauro's results in backgammon.


Download Instructions
---------------------
You can ftp the paper directly from
ftp://syseng.anu.edu.au/~jon/papers/knightcap.ps.gz

If you want to learn more about KnightCap, check out
http://syseng.anu.edu.au/lsg and follow the knightcap link. You can
retrieve the paper from there, the latest source code and watch a
version of KnightCap ("KnightC") playing on ICC with our chess
applet.