Author: Andrew Williams
Date: 02:49:47 03/29/00
Go up one level in this thread
On March 28, 2000 at 21:06:25, Christophe Theron wrote: >On March 28, 2000 at 11:28:27, Peter Skinner wrote: > >>I have noticed that quite a few amateur programs other than Crafty have been >>kicking the hell out of commercial programs such as Shredder 4, Chess Genius >>6.5, and Fritz 5.32, and Junior 6. >> >>Why is this happening? >> >>Crafty has always done this, but now Comet, AnMon, LG2000v2000 2.5, and others, >>are equally taking them to task. >> >>This is not really surprising though as most of these programs could easily be >>commercial. > > >The difference between amateur and commercial programs is the thousands of hours >spend in fixing every little hole in the program. > >You can, it's true, find some amateur programs that will occasionally beat a >commercial program on one game. > >But if you organize a match between these 2 programs, the picture is really >different. > >The reason is not that the author of the amateur program is not as good as the >author of the commercial program. > >The reason is that the commercial programmer has spent an huge amount of time >looking for small problems, and has fixed them. > > [SNIP] > >The final result is 9.5-0.5 in favor of the commercial program. Let me say that >this commercial product did not impress me at all when I followed the games. I'm >not even sure that it justified its incredibly high price of $59.95. > > > >OK, this is just a story I imagined. I just want to tell that the commercial >programmer is probably not smarter than the author of the amateur program. But >every game the commercial has won has been won by very hard work on an >incredible number of very small details. > >That is where the difference is. > [SNIP] Very interesting, Christophe. If we had such an award, this would be an early contender for Best CCC Post of the Year (IMO of course). Cheers Andrew
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