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Subject: Re: To all programmers

Author: Pauli Misikangas

Date: 10:52:47 09/05/00

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On September 05, 2000 at 07:36:11, Alain Lyrette wrote:

>After all those years working to improve your programs,refining search
>etc...would you say that it help you become a better chess player or that we're
>talking about 2 completely different issues here?if it helped you by how much?

I don't know about chess programming, but doing shogi (japanese chess
programming has improved my shogi playing skills significantly. In fact, me and
my program have learned together, since the reason to start making a shogi
program was that I didn't have anybody else to play with... :-) So, in the
beginning, neither of us could play shogi - we both started from scratch. Now my
program is the 8th best shogi program in the world (according to the last
championship) and I am one of the strongest shogi players in Finland (easy to
say because we have only a few shogi players here ;-).

I guess that the programming itself is not very helpful, but analyzing the games
played by the program is. I think this is somewhat different in shogi, because
we don't have such a huge set of test positions as you chess programmers use to
test your programs. So, I cannot just look at the score got from some
pre-defined tests (because I don't have any). Instead, I have to analyze games
played by my program and try to find out what was the reason why it made such
moves. I must have spent hundreds of hours just watching how my program plays
against other programs. As a side effect, I have learned a lot of useful
attacking and defending techniques. And perhaps more important, I have learned
to avoid making those stupid mistakes shogi programs do! :-)

Pauli Misikangas





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