Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 16:15:32 05/18/99
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On May 18, 1999 at 18:52:57, Dave Gomboc wrote: [snip] >How much of a problem do expect from the "chesslab patent pending"? I am not >sure what they are patenting... they have a web-browser front end to a chess >database? Surely there must be something more specific. I just don't really >know about it. First I have heard of it. Software patents are absurd [IMO] and directly akin to patenting math, which is illegal. But hey, I'm not a lawyer. If it turns out that somehow I am breaking any law I will stop doing it. You never know what sort of stupidity will be allowed. But if it is the law, I will obey it. In any case, what I am going to provide is source code that uses a skiplist [public domain concept by William Pugh -- 1980] to retrieve data for end user programs. The data structure could be changed to any other technique, for that matter. AVL tree, perfect hash, whatever. The user will provide a position vector and retrieve pointers to position data. I envision (for instance) asking for the current position and all positions immediately reachable from that position. If any positions in the vector exist in the list, an address to those positions in the vector will be returned. If any position is missing, then a corresponding NULL pointer will be returned. You will also be able to publish data *back* to the engine. So instead of asking me about a position, you can tell me about one. Then, the next time you run the program, it will know what you told it last time. I was not planning an HTML interface.
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