Author: Uri Blass
Date: 06:31:12 12/23/05
Go up one level in this thread
On December 23, 2005 at 09:14:49, Andrew Williams wrote: >On December 23, 2005 at 07:01:00, Paul Jacobean Sacral wrote: > >>On December 23, 2005 at 06:28:28, Ryan B. wrote: >> >>>>Fabian gained nothing code wise being open source. The only change Toga made >>>that Fabian also did was extending recaps in PV. >> >>I think is was more than that. > >The problem with this opinion is that you don't have the faintest idea what you >are talking about. Because of this, anything that you "think" is not going to be > useful in this debate. > >> >>But ok, let the future decide: Now, while Toga will not be improved anymore, as >>T.Gaksch has announced, watch how "suddenly" quick improvements of Fruit will >>stop as well. Oopsie...? Pure coincidence, I'm sure. Yes, absolutely. There is >>no connection between these two facts, surely not... :-))) >> >>Yours truly Paul J. Sacral > >You write about chess programs as if the work of putting together board >representation, move generation, evaluation, search control, transposition table >was simple. But it is *that* work which makes Toga so strong and Gaksch did not >do it. I have no idea whether Toga's author at first tried to pass of Toga as >his own work or not. But whether or not he did, he started with ALL of the hard >work done. Anybody can take an existing program and tinker around with the >source code and stumble upon an improvement - there's no skill in that. The >skill is in creating a strong program in the first place. If you don't believe >me, why do you think that Thomas started out with Fruit and not (eg) GNUchess? > >Andrew I agree that it is significantly harder to write a strong program relative to improving strong free source programs but I do not agree that there is no skill in improving an existing program. You need to know something about programming in order to do it. I agree that a lot of programmers can improve a strong program if they try to do it but not everybody can get the same improvement and it is clear that there are people who can get bigger improvement if they try so I do not like treating improvement of free source programs as nothing. Uri
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