Author: Will Singleton
Date: 01:02:59 02/20/98
All, Well, I just thought I'd share with you an example of my ridiculous stupidity, one in a continuing series of blunders that characterize my programming style in general. In the spirit of catharsis, you know. Late this afternoon, trying to squeeze in some program mods to Amateur before going home, while avoiding work at the same time :), I added some code to the "continuous think" logic (I hate "permanent brain" for some reason), so that the damn program would actually move immediately when appropriate. In a hurry to get home, I set the thing up to play automated on fics (with my own custom mac interface, I might add), having played a blitz or two to test the new stuff. So, when I get home, I log on to fics and look Amateur's history file, and, shock, it has lost it's last six games in a row, and is still playing! Arrgghh!! So I shut it down by logging on as Amateur, and proceed to blame it all on lag. Later on, when I cooled down, I checked out the games it lost. This was after I had fired off messages to everyone concerned that there was discrimination against mac programmers, because we don't have an interface with timeseal/timestamp, so we have to roll our own interface with lag compensators, etc etc... But when I looked at the games it lost, I found I was wrong. I looked at each game, one thru six, and each one ended when the opponent castled. Apparently, I had introduced a bug in my latest code, one that caused the program to hang after the opponent castled. I guess it went into *real* continuous-think mode, and without timeseal, ran out of time. So, fellow programmers and chess players, that's my tale of woe. You'd think I'd know better by now. But maybe not, given Hyatt's snafu with kk-kup openings. btw, Amateur plays (or, will play soon when debugged) on ICC and fics. Match it sometime and let me know what you think. Will Singleton
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.