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Subject: Re: best chess programmers

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 15:05:19 07/20/00

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On July 20, 2000 at 13:44:12, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On July 19, 2000 at 21:24:27, Wayne Lowrance wrote:
>
>>On July 19, 2000 at 21:05:18, walter irvin wrote:
>>
>>>my best 5 chess programmers
>>>1.deep blue team (deep blue)
>>>2.richard lang (all were good + 8 titles!!!!!!)
>>>3.amir ban (deep junior)
>>>4.frans morsch (fritz)
>>>5.ed  (chess machine  and rebel)
>>>
>>>there are a few that get left off the list ,either they did not win a title or
>>>they just could not keep pace with the better programs .
>>
>>Dont you have a spot for Dr Rober Hyatt on that list ? I could not begin to give
>>you the correct order except Dr Hyatt has got to receive major
>>attention/consideration !
>
>Hsu, Lang, Morsch, and Ed all have incredible history behind them. Hyatt
>doesn't. I don't really consider Amir to be a legend (yet) and his name is
>easily replaced with a number of others. Kittinger, Stanback, Bruce Moreland,
>Christophe, Stefan, Uniakle, de Koening; sorry if I left anybody out. But I
>consider any of these guys more impressive than Hyatt.
>
>-Tom

Glad to see there's nothing personal going on on your end of the Bob - Tom
equation.

Bob gets credit for a lot of stuff:

1) Writing Cray Blitz.  Was it the best program ever written?  Would it have
performed against modern micros?  Who cares!  It was there, when it was there,
it won two championships, it got into the news, it promoted its sponsor, and Bob
gets credit for putting it all together.

2) Writing Crafty.  Crafty isn't the world champion, but who cares, it's
obviously a high-end program and it's open source!  It's been downloaded by a
zillion people who either want to play against it or learn from the source, and
thousands of people have played against it on the Internet and are playing
against it right now.

3) Being an Internet authority.  He has something to say about essentially
everything technical.  He says it not to show how smart he is, or to put others
down, but because he wants to help people solve problems and make their chess
programs better.  If you ask Bob a question you get an answer, and it's the best
answer he can give you, and he'll do work to get you the answer.  And this is
not just a recent thing, he's been doing this since the Internet came of age and
before.

4) Researching and publishing.  He's published useful articles on Cray Blitz, in
a field where most published articles are not useful, especially early articles.
 He's also published several articles about Crafty and about general computer
chess topics such as diminishing returns in search and parallel search.  This is
stuff that anyone can learn from and many have.  Any computer chess library will
contain articles written by Bob.

The issue of who should be especially honored among members of our community
should be many-faceted.  I think that it is tempting to elevate the person who
has won recent championships or who is on top of the SSDF list, etc.  I think
that is a ridiculously narrow view.  If you look at overall sustained
contribution, you can't possibly arrive at the conclusions you have reached.

bruce



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