Author: Adrien Regimbald
Date: 17:58:24 06/19/00
Hello, I've recently become curious as to how much of a gain each of you are willing to do a non-trivial ammount of work for. Of course, if the change to code is trivial, and provides a measurable gain, I imagine that any of us would be willing to implement the change. The debate then lies with the cutoff line between value to strength of the program and effort to implement it. I think it is only fair for me to state before I discuss this that with my program Faile, I am a bit conservative about adding things to it. The code is fairly neat, and to some extent, a major goal of my project is to keep the code as neat and clear as possible so that it will be of use to other people. That being said - sometimes I am completely baffled by the lengths to which we will go to improve our programs. Some improvements will offer at most a 1 or 2% gain .. and it will take at _least_ 50 of these to attain any noticable improvement in strength. Not to mention that with the addition of 50 competing code additions, sometimes code quality deteriorates quickly. The commercial programs of course have to use these improvements - they need every ounce of strength they can squeeze out of their programs, because they are, after all, getting paid for it. My personal approach so far is to incorporate the "major" ideas into my program, keep it as neat as possible, and release the source for everyone to hopefully find useful. After I've fixed the bugs, and implemented requested features, etc, I post a 'final version' on my web page. After that, I tend to tinker around with my own ideas on my home computer. Some of them actually do end up having significant payoffs (although they could quite likely have been thought of already) .. but these are my own ideas. With this in mind, I am really having a hard time understanding why an author would take an idea that isn't original and add it to their program only give a very very marginal gain at the risk of code clarity. Is the only goal of the amaeteur chess programmer to squeeze out that last rating point that they can get out of their program in a constant quest for the highest rating? If it is, I think we have missed the boat in a big way.. Regards, Adrien.
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