Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 10:36:22 03/29/00
Go up one level in this thread
On March 29, 2000 at 02:24:13, Steffen Jakob wrote:
>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.
I think we understand each other perfectly here. After all, just a few months
ago, I was myself an amateur. I've been thru all these problems, and actually
I'm still fighting with these little details that change a loss to a draw, and a
draw to a win.
Christophe
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.