Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: The privilege of beacoming a beta-tester

Author: Enrique Irazoqui

Date: 11:37:53 09/05/00

Go up one level in this thread


On September 05, 2000 at 14:31:10, Fernando Villegas wrote:

>Hi, dear friend:
>Curiously enough, I have toyed for a time with the idea to write an article
>about the sociology of this field. By example, try to explain why some countries
>has a big number of chess programmers and other not. With just a glance you can
>see, for example, that Germany and Netherland has a very high number of them and
>are the craddle of many top programs, but other countries equally rich,
>populated and sophisticated, as Italy, has almost nothing. Nevertheles, what you
>describe is something more akin to sychology than to sociology. I imagine that
>the reason why so many people is prepared to suffer all the inconveniences you
>painted so well is that they are a solitary bunch of people, not neccesarily
>very succesful in his real lives and so very demanding of anything that gives
>them a sense to be part of an elite AND of being active in some top notch
>endeavour. I am sure that many people that beta test -excepting you, I know you
>well, enrique- very quickly developes fantasies about being important in the
>creation of the engine itself. I imagine they sayibng to his friends "look, I
>have been advicing Mr.....to develope his echess engine and I can say that this
>and that feature of the program was created by me". And they sincerely believe
>so.

That wouldn't be sociology, but tragedy, Greek kind of.

> Very sad. But, of course, we, human beings, are a very sad bunch of monkeys.
>We already know that, is'nt, Enrique?

I don't, definitely not. Now that I think of it, this wouldn't be sociology
either, but café talk, the best kind there is.

Cheers, Enrique

>Fernando



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.