Author: Ritter Rost
Date: 02:08:01 11/11/00
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Maybe with the exception of the good old board computers there was never much money for the chess programmers to be earned. But there was an honourable intellectual quest in the past: Beating strong human players. That could yield quite some social prestige. a) The Deep Blue match hacked a big dent in that motivation. b) FIDE banning computers has made it difficult to enter human tournaments c) Machines are fast enough and known programming techniques efficient enough to beat your average human chess master comfortably without major creativity needed. Playing computers against each other has some entertainment value but the thrill seems limited to me. Man vs. Machine matches can arouse interest outside chess. Machine vs. Machine matches are probably seen outside an extreme hardcore scene as something which grownup people would not normally spend their time on, like testing which computer can count faster from 1 to 1000. So chess programming is commercially unhappy and has lost public esteem outside the scene. If I were a chess programmer I would also be a bit put off by the not very rewarding feedback from the public as it e.g. manifests itself in internet discussion groups. It must be painful to read self-appointed experts who'd never be able to write "Hello World" in Visual Basic judge the effort of ones thousands of blood-sweat-and-tears programming hours with incredible self-assuredness. In the academic world you exchange ideas with your peers. You earn social prestige, admiration and money by making valuable contributions. In computer chess you cannot exchange ideas with your peers because you are either threatening them with in law-suits or you allege that they are cheating in SSDF or whatsoever. If you meet with them on tournaments like the WCCC the social fun and intellectual exchange is spoilt by the fact that winning the tournament is crucial for your very economic survival. No wonder, the only existing journal, the ICCA-publication is a big-time joke from a scientific standpoint. Moreover you are often working alone and one of the joys of programming, developing and contributing in a productive and happy team is taken away from you. So in todays world full of the most fascinating development challenges in regularly paid jobs, who wonders that there are only four or five professional chess programmers left?
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