Author: Dan Honeycutt
Date: 00:09:07 03/27/04
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On March 27, 2004 at 00:17:56, Steven Edwards wrote: >On naming one's chess program: > >I've written several chess programs over the past twenty-five years, but have >only given names to those that have played in human competition, or in the case >of Symbolic, an intent to compete against humans. My first named program was >called Vorpal after the nasty sword in _Jabberwocky_. A close derivative of >that z80 assembly language program got the name Oracle when I registered it with >the USCF some twenty years ago. Back in those days, an oracle in AI is what is >now more commonly called a KS (an encapsulated knowledge source). > >My mostly C language program Spector got its name because one of my goals was to >develop a chess player with a sense of introspection. The idea, not really >successful, was to enable a monitoring facility of some sort that would observe >the progress of the traditional A/B search and re-direct it when the search was >being unproductive. I punted on this attempt (for Spector, not for Symbolic) >because of the then difficult work required to get multithreading working in a >portable fashion on the old, pre-BSD Macintosh operating system. > >Symbolic is named as such in part because all of its high level processing is >done symbolically instead of numerically. (Perhaps I should rename the >underlying toolkit "Numeric".) Also, I couldn't think of a better name; some >decent alternatives have already been taken by various well known programming >efforts in non-chess AI fields. > >I note that many chess programs have customized identifying logo artwork. >Unlike many Macintosh enthusiasts, I have absolutely no talent in the graphic >arts. So my logo for Symbolic is very simple: a couple of Lisp cons cells drawn >in box and arrow notation. The first cons has its cdr pointing to the second >cons which has a nil cdr pointer. The car pointer of the first cons connects to >a Lisp atom with a black knight, and the car of the second cons points to a >white king atom. These were chosen as my first non-paper chess programming >attempt was a "knight chases king" routine on my 1976 HP-25 calculator with its >49 step program memory. > >-------- > >Interestingly, in the Early Days chess programs were rare beasts and so were >known by the names of their author(s) instead of having an identification of >their own. I believe that Richard Greenblatt's famous program was the first to >get its own moniker: MacHack Six. For the youngsters here, its "Mac" part >pre-dates Macintosh computers by almost twenty years; it refers to the MAC (Man >And Computer) Program then active at MIT. > >-------- > >Cool/amusing program names over the years: > >"Treefrog" ([my favorite] mid 1970s, by Hunsen, Calnek, and Crook) > >"Patsoc" ("Plays a terrible sort of chess" by Berliner) > >"TinkerBelle" (Thompson's experimental version of Belle; unusable today because >of probable Disney lawsuit) > >"Kaissa" (from Russia, a good pick for an internationally known program) > >"Iron Fish" ([another favorite] mid 1970s) > >"Chaos" (also from the 1970s) > >--------- > >Dumb (IMHO) naming ideas: > >1. Naming a program after a famous dead GM. > >2. Naming a program after a famous live GM. > >3. Naming any program from before the mid 1980s with any of "expert", "master", >or "grandmaster" but with absolutely no chance of playing at such a level. > >-------- > >Finally, the Best Chess Program Source Module Name That Can Appear In A Family >Website: > >"SuperBananaBeyond" from Chess 4.x It's been many years but if if memory serves Sargon (the Spracklins) had in it's code something akin to a fatal error handler which displayed the message "Sargone". Dan H.
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