Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 11:03:11 02/16/04
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On February 16, 2004 at 13:58:00, Tord Romstad wrote: >On February 16, 2004 at 13:20:00, Steven Edwards wrote: > >>From: Robert Hyatt (hyatt@crafty.cis.uab.edu) >>Subject: Re: Chess in LISP >>Newsgroups: rec.games.chess.computer >>Date: 1997/04/07 >> >>Stefan Hahndel (hahndel@informatik.tu-muenchen.de) wrote: >> >>: In article <5i4bpe$or0@juniper.cis.uab.edu>, hyatt@crafty.cis.uab.edu (Robert >>Hyatt) writes: >>: [...] >>: |> Nope. for the humor impaired, or non-computer types, LISP is *not* the >>: |> language of choice for a chess program. Hard to read. very slow. >>: |> Interpreted, even on the old "lisp" machines that were built for a >>: |> while... >>: Dear Bob, >>: why not ? >>: You think only about a alpha-beta style chess program and brute force. >>: Is really absolutely impossible that someone will write an "intelligent", >>: knowledge-based (or some other approach) chess program in lisp in future ? >> >>no. but they will probably be using a computer that is powered by >>electrical energy produced by a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction. >> >>:) > >Bob's old statement is, of course, dead wrong. Lisp is neither interpreted >nor very slow. I know only one modern Common Lisp implementation which does >not compile to machine code. Please re-read my statement. Look at the date. Then re-read yours. My statement was written in 1997. In general Lisp _was_ interpreted. Of course, so was BASIC. Yet there were basic compilers as well. My primary point was speed. Lisp is slow. It always was slow. It always will be slow. That is why there has been no successful chess engine based on LISP yet. LISP is like a host of other programming languages that have their place. Prolog. Snobol4. Even COBOL. And used in their place, they work well. But high-performance computing is _not_ their "place". > Many of the compilers also produce excellent >code, for many tasks the performance is comparable to C compilers. It is >also not hard to read, if you have spent a minimum of time working with >the language. > >I hope that I some day find the time to write a fast, conventional chess >program in Lisp, just as a proof of concept. > >Erran Gat's old study comparing the performance of Lisp to C/C++ and Java >for a simple programming task is getting rather old, but for those who >haven't seen it, it is well worth reading: > >http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/home/gat/lisp-study.html > >Of course a study containing a bigger number of programming tasks would >have been preferable, but at any rate just a superficial glance at the >numbers should be enough to convince most people that it is not at all >impossible to write fast programs in Lisp. > >For a particulary short, efficient and pretty Lisp solution to the problem, >have a look at the following page: > >http://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html > >Tord
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