Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 17:42:21 07/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 2000 at 18:05:19, Bruce Moreland wrote: >On July 20, 2000 at 13:44:12, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > >>On July 19, 2000 at 21:24:27, Wayne Lowrance wrote: >> >>>On July 19, 2000 at 21:05:18, walter irvin wrote: >>> >>>>my best 5 chess programmers >>>>1.deep blue team (deep blue) >>>>2.richard lang (all were good + 8 titles!!!!!!) >>>>3.amir ban (deep junior) >>>>4.frans morsch (fritz) >>>>5.ed (chess machine and rebel) >>>> >>>>there are a few that get left off the list ,either they did not win a title or >>>>they just could not keep pace with the better programs . >>> >>>Dont you have a spot for Dr Rober Hyatt on that list ? I could not begin to give >>>you the correct order except Dr Hyatt has got to receive major >>>attention/consideration ! >> >>Hsu, Lang, Morsch, and Ed all have incredible history behind them. Hyatt >>doesn't. I don't really consider Amir to be a legend (yet) and his name is >>easily replaced with a number of others. Kittinger, Stanback, Bruce Moreland, >>Christophe, Stefan, Uniakle, de Koening; sorry if I left anybody out. But I >>consider any of these guys more impressive than Hyatt. >> >>-Tom > >Glad to see there's nothing personal going on on your end of the Bob - Tom >equation. > >Bob gets credit for a lot of stuff: > >1) Writing Cray Blitz. Was it the best program ever written? Would it have >performed against modern micros? Who cares! It was there, when it was there, >it won two championships, it got into the news, it promoted its sponsor, and Bob >gets credit for putting it all together. Two points on this: 1) Was Bob the only person responsible for CB? I thought he had partners. Who knows how much he really contributed to its strength. Lang, Morsch, etc. were on their own. 2) CB ran on a Cray. If I'm not mistaken, "Blitz" was not extremely impressive. If CB's competition was also running on Crays, who knows how it would have done. >2) Writing Crafty. Crafty isn't the world champion, but who cares, it's >obviously a high-end program and it's open source! It's been downloaded by a >zillion people who either want to play against it or learn from the source, and >thousands of people have played against it on the Internet and are playing >against it right now. Making your program open source is not a way to be a "great programmer." It takes exactly zero effort to make a program open source. >3) Being an Internet authority. He has something to say about essentially >everything technical. He says it not to show how smart he is, or to put others >down, but because he wants to help people solve problems and make their chess >programs better. If you ask Bob a question you get an answer, and it's the best >answer he can give you, and he'll do work to get you the answer. And this is >not just a recent thing, he's been doing this since the Internet came of age and >before. I've seen Bob misunderstand/misread questions and post unrelated answers (sometimes with bad data) so often that I think this argument is bogus too. Anyway, what does answering questions have to do with being a great programmer, either? >4) Researching and publishing. He's published useful articles on Cray Blitz, in >a field where most published articles are not useful, especially early articles. > He's also published several articles about Crafty and about general computer >chess topics such as diminishing returns in search and parallel search. This is >stuff that anyone can learn from and many have. Any computer chess library will >contain articles written by Bob. I'd say this is a gray area between being a good chess programmer and being a good person. Sure, okay, publishing papers might get him in the running for a top-5 position. But when you compare that to some of Lang's achievements, it looks pretty weak. -Tom
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