Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 17:57:04 07/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 2000 at 20:42:21, Tom Kerrigan wrote: [snip] >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. It won the world championship. If someone else had written a better program and ran it on a cray, then you could argue that point. They could also have invented Hsu's chip or we may as well teleport Deep Junior and its lovely 8-way box back in time to play against "The Turk" as long as we're inventing things that never happened. >>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. It takes a lot of effort to make your program open source. I'll bet Bob has spent approximately one third Tom K. lifetime just answering crafty questions. >>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? Bob makes mistakes, as we all do. Does that neutralize his efforts? I don't think so. >>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. What has publishing papers got to do with being a good person? A whinging twit can publish excellent papers. I know, because I have written some (not chess, but I am published). ;-) >-Tom
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