Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 09:16:17 05/21/00
Go up one level in this thread
On May 21, 2000 at 11:27:07, Mogens Larsen wrote: >On May 21, 2000 at 10:56:19, Christophe Theron wrote: >>I went pro once I have closed the gap, so I'm not sure I can answer your >>question. >>Anyway, don't forget I'm working on Chess Tiger since 1982... >I don't intend to :o). If I sometime in the future feel the urge to buy a piece >of chess software, it would be Chess Tiger (or Shredder :o)). >>I do not know if it is still the case, but I think that to be on top you have to >>be extremely creative and invent original techniques. >Why is Crafty getting closer then? The hardware have remained the same for some >time as far as I know. Are the professional programs slowing down creatively? >>It is indeed much easier. You just connect on the net, download Crafty and >>several other free chess programs with their source code, and work from that. >>Great, but the drawback of this is that programmers do not have to reinvent >>everything. That makes them more lazy, and I'm sure a lot of creativity is lost. >That is my impression as well. I've also got the impression that some >programmers try new ideas and building things from scratch, but that progress is >a _lot_ harder to come by. Maybe too hard for some. I think the most workable approach will be a hybrid approach. You should study all the pre-existing chess literature. It would be foolish to ignore all the research that others have done. It would be like trying to come up with great algorithms having never read Knuth's TAOCP. You should download a lot of computer programs. You should try to figure out every clever thing that they do and why do they do it that way. You should try to piece something together yourself. Newton said that he could see so far because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. What he obviously meant was that all the mathematical discoveries that lead up to calculus were needed in order to make the breakthrough. I think it is utter foolishness to take someone else's program and think you will have a world-beater by tweaking the eval or something. You will never be even as good as the original author by this approach. While you may have some initial success, at some point you will be left in the dust and looking silly.
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