Author: David Rasmussen
Date: 05:30:35 01/12/01
Go up one level in this thread
On January 12, 2001 at 07:18:38, Uri Blass wrote: >On January 12, 2001 at 05:21:33, David Rasmussen wrote: > >>On January 11, 2001 at 20:25:47, Christophe Theron wrote: >>>> >>>>Mankind benefits from the sharing of truth. >>> >>> >> >>I agree totally with Dann on this, and I've stated similar views before. >> >>> >>>Really? >>> >>>The main engine of mandkind progress is competition. It is not cooperation. >>> >>>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. >>> >>>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. >>> >>> >>>Computer chess would be nowhere by now if there was no competition in the field. >>> >>> >>> >> >>I disagree completely. It is a nice idea, and it works in some cases, but >>history has thousands of examples of development flourishning when knowledge is >>shared or released. Look at what happened in shift from middle ages to >>renaissance. Enlightenment begets development. Also, look at the mathematics >>community of the last 500 years. > >People who published articles in mathematics were promoted in university so >there was a competition. > >Mathematics would be nowhere by now if there was no competition in the field. > >Uri Your statement about academic development is vastly simplified, and a distorted version of the truth. As I said, competition DOES have it's place. It still exists and it will continue to exist in a shared environment. But the competition is the drive that make us do things better than they already are, developing. So in a sense, we're competing with the past. Not with eachother. If all the knowledge is shared, people will still want to improve what is there, only now, there are many more minds working on it. Christophe might have had some good ideas, as have countless others that have shared them. You're saying that the fastest way for chess programming to evolve is to compete with hidden knowledge. I say that chess programming (or any field for that matter), will evolve faster when the knowledge is shared, and many minds are developing their own ideas on the basis of the ever growing pool of shared ideas. This has been verified in history countless times. A culture evolves when it meets another culture and they share knowledge.
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.