Author: David Fotland
Date: 11:19:28 02/02/98
Go up one level in this thread
I like computer go, and now computer chess, for many reasons. I've been writing game AI's for 20 years, and expect to continue until I die. There is a lot of satisfaction in solving a hard problem or puzzle. Since game AI's continue to improve, every week or month (or day early in the life of a chess program :) you get some satisfaction that you have made an improvement or solved a problem. There is a rating system, so you can see results of your improvements, and can guage your progress. If you develop a strong program, you gain fame and recognition among your peers, and if you publish a strong program, you gain fame among a wider audience. A few people can make a living or significant money from game AI's, but that's not why most people do it. In my case, having some income pays for new computer hardware every year, and helps convince my wife that it is ok for me to spend so much time on it. Chess search techniques (alpha-beta, iterative deepening, hash tables, endgame databases, etc) are directly applicable to many similar tactical games, like checkers (see Chinook), othello, or chess variants. I've used them for domineering and othello successfully. Backgammon is trickier due to the dice and doubling cube, and the top programs are learning programs. In Go, alpha-beta is used for local tactical problems and life and death analysis. But since human beginners can look 20 ply or more deep in some local situations, go programs use a selective search. I don't use iterative deepening, since I can get very good move ordering with a little go knowledge, and the searches have to go very deep in some lines (40 ply or more) to solve simple tactics. Knowledge respresentation and pattern matching are much more important in go than in most chess programs. At the full board, most moves are made for strategic reasons, and using an evaluation function and lookahead doesn't work well. Almost all strong programs evaluate moves on strategic considerations, rather than evaluate positions with an evaluation function. If anyone is interested I can give some examples of positions that beginning go players solve quickly, that need fairly deep search for a brute force solver. David Fotland On January 31, 1998 at 02:36:31, Stuart Cracraft wrote: >I've been asked by people unfamiliar with computer chess why >I enjoy it. > >The usual question I give is that it creates "busy work" >and we all know that the idle mind is the devil's playground. :-) >In other words, the program seems to have no real ending. > >Anyway, why do you like to program computer chess? Do you think >you could translate some of this into programming another board >game like Go, Backgammon, Checkers, etc.? Or no? > >--Stuart
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.