Author: Don Dailey
Date: 10:50:19 06/14/98
I think a knowledge based approach to computer chess is not elegant at all. However I use it because I do not see a better approach. My program keeps accumulating more and more knowledge and seems to keep improving as a result of it. I'm forced to use this ugly brute force technique because I do not know a better way. At the rate we are going with ram prices plummeting and our computer memories getting larger and larger, we may someday have as much memory in our computers as humans have in their heads. Already chess programs use many megabytes of memory, and if we continue this ugly trend toward modeling the human brain we will soon have chess programs requiring huge amounts of memory. This is not a pleasing development at all and is so wasteful. The culmination of all of this might be the 32 man database. This will be a sad day indeed when a simple table lookup gives you the right answer in every position. Then our programs will play like super humans, having instant and perfect intuition in every position. My program used to have some clever rules to play king and pawn versus king correctly. I now have a database, but the two are exactly equivalent and both return the right answer every time. The program plays the ending perfectly, just like most strong humans do. In fact, it's better than the way humans do it because humans use a combination of search and knowledge. Maybe it will be more human that us because everyone knows humans shouldn't use a search, only stupid programs do this. - Don
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