Author: Carmelo Calzerano
Date: 16:15:49 12/10/01
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On December 10, 2001 at 15:43:16, Dann Corbit wrote: >On December 10, 2001 at 14:52:16, Carmelo Calzerano wrote: >[snip] >>I agree. >>But don't forget that Crafty's code has to be enough clean and easy >>to read, to allow people like you and myself to understand it without >>much pain... This leaves commercial chess programmers much more >>freedom with optimizations, at least IMHO :-) > >This is mistaken thinking, I believe. The better documented a program is, the >easier it is for its *writer* to make improvements and optimizations. If >someone wrote 100,000 lines of assembly without a single comment and then came >back 3 years later, they will have no idea what they did. Of course, but that is not my point. A well written and commented optimized assembly routine is usually faster, but less readable and understandable, than a well written and commented, not-so-much-optimized C routine ;-) I'm not saying that Bob isn't placing any efforts in optimizing Crafty for speed; it's just a matter of different targets, I guess. I cannot answer for Bob, since I don't know his opinion about the subject; however, in the Crafty docs he wrote: "Crafty offers everyone a very clean starting point... The search and quiescence code is reasonably straightforward, as is the evaluation code. If you are interested in trying a new search extension, you can be testing tomorrow, rather than next year..." I'm not saying that commercial programmers are doing any weird things tweaking their code; but writing code that should be understood and used by other (less skilled) people requires some different balancing between complexity and efficiency, thus leaving less freedom IMHO. Commercial chess programs code has to be understood only by the programmer himself, which (apart from being the author) is usually far more skilled in chess programming than people toying around with Crafty sources... >Chess programs are excellent because of well written algorithms. A good >algorithm will beat the pants off of months of hand tweaking construcst to make >those same constructs a bit faster. Sure, I know this very well by my own experience :-) Bye, Carmelo
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