Author: Steffen Jakob
Date: 23:24:13 03/28/00
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Hi Christophe! That was a very good posting! I had a deja-vu in almost each of your examples! E.g. in the first round of the CCT1 tournament Hossa lost his game from Nimzo in a won position because of a permanent brain bug which caused Hossa to move immediately although he didn't have any information from the PB phase and so made a move from a very short search which lost the game at one. After the game I first thought: "Well, my program had a won position and I prob. can find a workaround for this stupid problem in half an hour. If I only had done this before my engine would have won against one of the strongest program on earth in my first serious tournament!". I somehow felt like the true winner of this game but then realized that exactly the reason why my program lost this game is the most important difference between commercials and amateurs. Indeed I implemented this workaround in a very short time, but it didnt solve all problems. It turned out that I had a elementary design flaw which I fixed later... which took several days. If I say "days" I mean days where I could use some hours of my free time. For me as an amateur programmer it is more interesting to spend the time I have to work on Hossa to implement new things... to realize my own ideas... it's not so much fun to cleanup code, and being an amateur the whole thing is basically motivated by having fun. So I have a lot of code with lots of bugs. Very often Hossa would play stronger if he didn't have this code at all! Your list also gives an idea how complex the area of computer chess programming is. You have to consider so many things to get a competitive engine which is an extremely time intensive issue. After the first CCT1 round I discussed the difference of amateurs and commercials with Chrilly Donninger and he had the same opinion as you have: the main difference is stability. This is the main reason why I froze my current version of Hossa last week and started to rewrite my program giving myself as much time as it takes to do everything as carefully as possible. I am very curious how the playing strength will change :-) Best wishes, Steffen.
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