Author: martin fierz
Date: 14:07:02 02/16/04
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On February 16, 2004 at 15:24:19, Frank Karger wrote: [snip] > On the other hand development time is a strong > argument. For example if you want to write the best > chess program in the world you mainly have to try > many ideas and - if you are lucky - your ideas will > form the best program. > > Some studies show that development time in languages > like Lisp is about half than in C, Java or C++. > e.g. http://www.algo.be/cl/TEE-lisp/31837187622993390/index.htm > > So, we have about 5% loss in speed (perhaps even less if you > look at the Ocaml-Compiler) but 100% gain in productivity. i don't buy this, for two reasons: 1) i started writing my chess program on the 1st of july 2003. it's written in pure C. it played it's first games within a week. it has been playing on ICC now for months. it's not a great program by any standard, but it's a decent amateur engine. steven edwards has been posting about Symbolic, his LISP-engine, for what seems like ages to me. it hasn't played a single game yet AFAIK. where exactly is the reduced development time here?? 2) once you have your basic engine running, the smallest part in improving it is actual coding. what you really need to do is look at the games it plays, find out what it's doing wrong, and find out how to fix it. this evening, i looked at 70 blitz games my engine played during the day against other engines. looking at them and drawing conclusions about what to do took me about 90 minutes (needless to say, i could have spend much more time on this!). applying the conclusions to my code took 30 minutes - half of this was changing eval weights and quickly checking whether the eval in the positions i had in mind was now better. right now, i'm performing sanity checks which takes another hour. once they are done, i'm running another 120 blitz games which takes until tomorrow evening. so out of 24 hours time going into improving my engine, 30 minutes are spent with actual coding. half of that is changing weights in the eval, which takes the same amount of time regardless of programming language. even if i could be 50% more efficient programming lisp, which i don't believe, i would have saved exactly 7.5 minutes today. :-) cheers martin
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