Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: not really!

Author: martin fierz

Date: 09:18:16 01/12/04

Go up one level in this thread


On January 12, 2004 at 12:10:08, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 12, 2004 at 10:36:22, martin fierz wrote:
>
>>On January 12, 2004 at 09:53:15, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>>The problem is that Turing didn't do "computer chess".  He did a hand
>>>simulation that was not based on minmax at all...  There were a couple
>>>of mechanical chess players as well, one built by Shannon prior to 1949,
>>>as I have an early 1949 photo of him sitting by this machine.  But that
>>>isn't "computer chess" either.
>>
>>hmm, define "computer chess" for me!
>>
>>i would say: turing computed chess moves => it was computer chess.
>
>I define "computer chess" as "using a computer to play the game of chess."
>
>While what Turing did was both important and interesting, it was not "computer
>chess" by any definition of "computer" I can think of...

AFAIK the word "computer" referred to an office clerk doing mindless
computations long before that thing known to us as a computer was known. but i'm
not too sure about that...

>No, because I can't do a "1-ply" search.  Even with 1-ply I get to ply=2, call
>the static eval, and return the best of that number or the resulting capture
>search. :)

ok, but that is something that is in crafty. in principle you *could* search to
depth 1 and not have to do minimax.
of course you're right that shannon was the first to formulate his famous search
strategies and minimax, but i remain unconvinced about "computer chess" as a
whole. we'll need an english language expert to track down the origin of the
word computer ;-)

cheers
  martin



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.