Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 10:47:20 08/10/00
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On August 10, 2000 at 08:47:55, Dan Homan wrote: >I certianly agree that not having prior programming experience would make >writing a chess program quite challenging. > >However, I am really surprised by your last statement. Do you really know >experienced programmers who couldn't write a chess program or who actually >failed at writing one? Are you sure that it was something that was important Chess programming is not like normal programming, and I believe it can be very difficult for people even if they're good programmers otherwise. For most programs, it is immediately obvious if the program is working or not. But a chess program just spits out a lot of numbers and moves and there's nothing to tell you if it's working right. Also, debugging a chess program is difficult because it's an extremely fast and complicated loop. Finding the exact point of failure and stopping the program at that point is not easy and it's not something you have to do with normal programs. There are techniques to overcome these problems, but even good programmers may not think of these techniques. -Tom
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