Author: Gareth McCaughan
Date: 18:16:23 02/19/04
Go up one level in this thread
Martin Fierz wrote: [I said:] >> 1. What Steven's trying to do and what you're trying to do >> are entirely different things. [Martin:] > 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. Right. He's trying to solve an AI problem. AI is hard. And he's trying to do a bunch of other (to my mind somewhat irrelevant) things too, like speech recognition. Some of those other things are hard too. > 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. I've never implemented a chess program in Lisp, but I have written a truly awful one in Python, a language whose advantages for rapid development are similar to those of Lisp. It took me a weekend. (It was truly awful not only because it was written in a weekend, but also because (a) it was *meant* to play weakly, so as to provide a suitable opponent for a 5-year-old friend of mine, and (b) Python is a terrible language to use if you want to write a chess program that plays well, because there's basically no way to make it run at near-C speeds. But, still, it wasn't entirely a toy. It spoke the winboard/xboard protocol (with a bit of an accent), it searched in a fairly sensible way (alpha-beta, qsearch, some search extensions), and so on.) I'm a pretty good C programmer, but I'd be surprised if I could write an equivalent program in C over a weekend. But I'm sure I could do it in Common Lisp about as easily as I did in Python, and it would run faster and therefore play better. -- g
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.