Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 18:30:40 07/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 2000 at 20:57:04, Dann Corbit wrote: >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. Actually it did happen. Check out "nuchess". It ran on a Cray. So did Lachex. So did Cube. Those come to mind instantly. Chess 4.x ran on a machine from CDC that was just as fast as a Cray. So crays were used. But they were not a "silver bullet" that you dropped in and your program suddenly became unbeatable. It was just another computer until you did your time in the barrel and learned how to use the particularly neat features the architecture offered to those willing to work for them... > >>>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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