Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 18:25:39 07/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 2000 at 20:42:21, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >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. This has been documented many times, assuming you read any computer chess literature that discusses Cray Blitz. I wrote _all_ the code. Harry's contribution was rewriting serious parts of the FORTRAN into assembly to make them faster. in the last 3-4 years of CB's life I took over this as Harry had gotten a little older, and had burned out as it was hard work. Bert Gower was responsible for most of the opening book. CB's "code" was mine. And mine alone... >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. Just like if everybody ran on DB's hardware they would be better than DB? This is such a childish argument. Do you know anything about supercomputers and vector processing and the Cray machine in particular? I didn't think so. You don't just drop a piece of code onto a Cray and it goes fast, unless it is a matrix-type code. Chess is not. Harry and I spent years looking at ways to make various parts of the program vectorize, from move generation to evaluation. It took thousands of hours of effort. > >>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 does take more effort to "beat it" though, doesn't it? It is open source _and_ very strong. With plenty of innovations from rotated bitmaps to being the first SMP (PC) program running... Not particularly spectacular as I have done SMP programming forever. But also not 'chickenfeed'... >>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? So. I have seen you do the same thing. I have seen you post arcane insults rather than answer simple and direct questions... I don't see your point... > >>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 Which WCCC events did Richard win, again??? I seem to have missed them. Winning that event has _never_ been easy. Only one program has done it twice in a row. :)
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