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Subject: Commercial program strength vs. amateur program strength

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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