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Subject: Re: On avoiding Gothic Chess licensing problems

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 10:24:23 06/19/04

Go up one level in this thread


On June 19, 2004 at 00:46:53, Keith Evans wrote:

>On June 18, 2004 at 23:24:53, Ed Trice wrote:
>
>>
>>>
>>>I would think that your own lawyer would advise you to stop posting.
>>>Seriously.
>>
>>Then stop thinking. You are not well suited to the task.
>
>Interesting that you would use such statement to insult the guy who helped you
>get CapaGnu running when you failed to do so on your own.

Keith, you have to remember who you are dealing with. Ed speaks from a position
of someone who has done his research and knows what he is talking about.
However, he makes misleading and false statements that indicate that he actually
knows very little about what he talks about. Take a look at his webpage
describing his Gothic Chess program.

http://www.gothicchess.org/gv_release.html

He has, of course, edited this since I began pestering him some time ago about
his incorrect facts.

"...an Array Move Generator is usually slower than a Bitboard Move Generator."

Of the hundreds of computer chess programmers that I have ever had discussions
with, including multiple commercial authors, Ed Trice is the only one who I have
heard give this opinion. Even Dr. Hyatt, a bonafide expert on bitboards, would
not make this claim, given 32-bit machines. In fact, he has said the opposite
many times. A bitboard move generator is slower than an array based move
generator. Where bitboards make up ground and "break even" with the array based
approach on 32-bit hardware is in position evaluation. I have written many
dozens of chess engines using many different board representations, and never
has an efficient bitboard implementation surpassed an efficient array/offset
implementation.

"What is needed is an 80-bit emulation core, and this is very difficult to
design."

I can't imagine why this would be "very difficult", other than the programming
ability of the author. Of course, to someone who is uninformed, this makes Ed
look like a very intelligent person.

"Gothic Vortex is capable of performing very deep searches in only a matter of
seconds!"

Wow! Gothic Vortex must be the only program that can do this! At least, that's
what an uninformed person will end up thinking.

Some of the gems that he has since edited were regarding Gothic Vortex beating
and outperforming Zillions of Games. Zillions of Games is a generic game playing
program that can play any board game you teach it to play. It is not a suprise
that this kind of program would fail miserably against a program written
specifically for one game.

Ed has since removed this portion of his webpage. I wonder why? Why not put it
back for all to read? Or are you, Ed, now of the opinion that any comparison
with Zillions of Games only reveals your own ignorance? That didn't stop you
before from shouting false statements from the mountain top. You make statements
that you think no one will be able to refute, and retract them later when you
actually do your homework. There is a pattern here. Why should we buy anything
else that you say in an equally cavalier fashion?



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