Author: martin fierz
Date: 01:24:06 02/17/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 16, 2004 at 21:00:52, Gareth McCaughan wrote: >Martin Fierz wrote: > >[Franz Karger:] >>> 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 >... >>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?? > >1. What Steven's trying to do and what you're trying to do >are entirely different things. yes, of course. but when some people write how fast you can write programs in lisp, and that that is the main advantage over C, then i simply have to state that the only lisp-chessprogram i know of is *not* at all looking like a fast development. it seems that whatever steven wants to do, he cannot do very quickly with standard lisp. perhaps the lisp fans know of some different engine that was implemented in 2 days or so, if that is the case i would like to hear about it. as long as i don't hear of such things, i have to assume that developing a chess program in lisp is not going to cut your development time significantly. >2. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, Steven's decided >to start by writing his own Lisp interpreter (with a bunch of >chess-related primitives built in) rather than gluing his >chess-related primitives into an existing Lisp implementation. >That means that (a) he's had to spend a certain amount of time >not writing in Lisp, but *implementing* Lisp, writing in C >(or C++; I forget), and (b) the Lisp he now has to work with >doesn't have all the nice things that, say, Common Lisp >has. Though it does have some neat chess primitives :-). > >3. For all we know, you may be a much better programmer than >Steven. hardly. i'm a hobby programmer. i have no degrees in computer science or anything. cheers martin > >>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. :-) > >That's a much more convincing reason. > >-- >g
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