Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 20:37:28 07/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 2000 at 21:25:39, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On July 20, 2000 at 20:42:21, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > >>On July 20, 2000 at 18:05:19, Bruce Moreland wrote: >> >>>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. >> >>Two points on this: >>1) Was Bob the only person responsible for CB? I thought he had partners. Who >>knows how much he really contributed to its strength. Lang, Morsch, etc. were on >>their own. > > >This has been documented many times, assuming you read any computer chess >literature that discusses Cray Blitz. I wrote _all_ the code. Harry's >contribution was rewriting serious parts of the FORTRAN into assembly to make >them faster. in the last 3-4 years of CB's life I took over this as Harry >had gotten a little older, and had burned out as it was hard work. Bert >Gower was responsible for most of the opening book. > >CB's "code" was mine. And mine alone... > > > > >>2) CB ran on a Cray. If I'm not mistaken, "Blitz" was not extremely impressive. >>If CB's competition was also running on Crays, who knows how it would have done. > > > >Just like if everybody ran on DB's hardware they would be better than DB? This >is such a childish argument. Do you know anything about supercomputers and >vector processing and the Cray machine in particular? I didn't think so. You >don't just drop a piece of code onto a Cray and it goes fast, unless it is a What were other people using at the time? This was the mid-80s, right? So for micro programs, we're talking 386s at best. Are you saying that a single Cray processor couldn't outrun a 386 at sequential code? Whatever. >>>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. >> >>Making your program open source is not a way to be a "great programmer." It >>takes exactly zero effort to make a program open source. >> > > >It does take more effort to "beat it" though, doesn't it? It is open source >_and_ very strong. With plenty of innovations from rotated bitmaps to being >the first SMP (PC) program running... This is bull. PCs have been around since the early 80s and Crafty has only been parallelized recently. Do you mean to tell me that for more than a decade, nobody in the whole world wrote a parallel chess program for PCs? In fact, I know that Zugzwang was tested on a parallel PC years before Crafy was SMP. Anyway, making a program open source does not mean that you're a good programmer. I've seen a ton of crap programs that are open source. >Not particularly spectacular as I have done SMP programming forever. But >also not 'chickenfeed'... > > > > >>>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. >> >>I've seen Bob misunderstand/misread questions and post unrelated answers >>(sometimes with bad data) so often that I think this argument is bogus too. >>Anyway, what does answering questions have to do with being a great programmer, >>either? > >So. I have seen you do the same thing. I have seen you post arcane insults >rather than answer simple and direct questions... I don't see your point... > > > > >> >>>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. >> >>I'd say this is a gray area between being a good chess programmer and being a >>good person. Sure, okay, publishing papers might get him in the running for a >>top-5 position. But when you compare that to some of Lang's achievements, it >>looks pretty weak. >> >>-Tom > > > > >Which WCCC events did Richard win, again??? I seem to have missed them. Winning >that event has _never_ been easy. Only one program has done it twice in a row. And how many WMCCCs has he won? But I guess those don't count, seeing as they're too easy, huh? I wish Crafty would stop winning them so somebody else could have a chance... oh, wait... -Tom
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