Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 09:28:45 12/20/01
I held a discussion recently in IRC with one of the founders of the website www.gamedev.net. We talked about several topics, but I recall him saying that the techniques used in commercial software will always be ahead of what is common knowledge and freely available to the general amateur programmer. Gamedev.net is mostly concerned with video games, and mostly 3D video games. In the 3D video game market, this is probably true. Is the same true in the chess programming market? I know that there are quite a few amateur programs that are capable of giving today's top commercial programs a good game. Crafty is always near the top of the pack in tournaments it competes in, and Ferret won the last CCT ahead of Fritz if I recall correctly. My question is twofold. 1) Are commercial programs significantly stronger than amateur programs today, and 2) are the techniques used in commercial chess programs vastly different from the techniques used in top amateur programs? In other words, is there likely to be any alternative (better) board representation or alternative to alpha-beta that a commercial chess program uses that the general computer chess programming public isn't aware of? Russell
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