Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 17:36:15 01/11/01
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On January 11, 2001 at 20:25:47, Christophe Theron wrote: [snip] >>Mankind benefits from the sharing of truth. > >Really? Yes. I did not say that it happens a lot. Maybe (even) I should have said "Mankind _would_ benefit from the sharing of truth." >The main engine of mandkind progress is competition. It is not cooperation. You can have both together. >This is how it works. The ideal of "sharing the truth" is a generous idea, but >this is not how it works in the real world. Admitted freely by me. >The only animal that behaves according to your idea is the ant. And maybe the >bee (I'm not a specialist). > >But competition is written in our genes. We love to hate each other and to fight >each other. We love to create groups and to belong to groups, then to fight the >groups in which we do not belong. Fighting is the activity we love to spend our >energy in. > >That's ugly, but that's the way we are. There is a lot of truth to this, unfortunately. >Computer chess would be nowhere by now if there was no competition in the field. I doubt it. In fact, if the early pioneers had not shared their ideas, I doubt if this forum would even exist. Nobody here learned all they know about chess programming in a hard vacuum. They gathered a large body of public knowlege first from those who were willing to share. If everyone always kept everything secret then nobody would ever learn anything except what they learned all by themselves. That would not amount to much. So, those that share are somehow necessary for progress to exist. I do not believe any claims that people can write chess programs without reading existing literature on that topic before hand.
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