Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 20:13:59 12/08/00
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On December 07, 2000 at 11:59:33, Uri Blass wrote: > >Junior was before Deep blue Junior so IBM started borrowing from a "famous >name". > >They could know that there is a name Junior for a chess program and they could >use another name if they wanted to do it. > >Uri I disagree with this line of reasoning. And I have explained why before. First, in 1984 a program by the name of "Cray Blitz Junior" was entered in the US Open speed chess championship. Why "junior"? Because we normally ran on a multiple-CPU Cray, but for that event we used a "cheapo cray" that had much slower memory and only one cpu. We wanted to differentiate between the "real" cray blitz and this much slower machine version. Second, in 1978 Ken Thompson showed up in Washington DC with a program that was called both "baby belle" and "belle junior"... it was much slower than the 5K noder per second real belle program, but was built into an electronic chess board he brought along. "junior" has _always_ been something added to a name to indicate "smaller" or "weaker". "George Foreman junior" for his small version of the cooker he sells. That is common. The second point is that the moniker "deep" seems to have zero meaning in the context of a chess engine adjective. We added "cray" to our original program name when Cray started to officially sponsor us with machine time. Schaeffer added "Sun" to his program "phoenix" when sun microsystems started to sponsor him. Several of us added "junior" to the end of our names to indicate "weaker version based on the full-sized version". I believe (personally) that "deep junior" was a form of protest over IBM's "deep blue junior". Which doesn't bother me in the least. I don't care who calls their program what, personally. It would make more sense to be 'unique' but that is only _my_ feeling. In any case, if you want to look, you can find games played in 1984 by "Cray Blitz Junior" which certainly supersedes any Micro program's use of that name. And we were second to do this behind Belle. I wouldn't be surprised to find out there were other "junior" editions of programs. There are plenty of "junior" editions of everything else on the planet.
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