Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 12:24:54 12/09/00
Go up one level in this thread
On December 08, 2000 at 23:13:59, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>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.
The context is very important in these cross-namings.
Imagine that I produce an engine named "Tiger Junior", or "Junior Tiger". I can
imagine that Amir wouldn't be very happy about my choice...
Christophe
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