Author: Frank Phillips
Date: 13:18:06 05/28/01
Go up one level in this thread
On May 28, 2001 at 13:30:44, Bruce Moreland wrote: >On May 28, 2001 at 08:33:19, Peter Berger wrote: > >>I think the CCT3 was a great and enjoyable event ! The atmosphere was very >>friendly and there were no debates this time . >> >>A few ideas and suggestions for future events though: >> >>a.) Every engine participating should be able to and do write logfiles . These >>should be sent to some arbiter right after the game has been finished in case of >>debates. >> >>As far as I know every participant would have been able to do so ( for example >>for the WinBoard programs the winboard.debug would be sufficient ) . > >There are some weird people out there who either want to take credit for other >people's work. I think there have been some others who don't realize that their >own work is pretty insignificant compared to what was already present in what >they started from. This is interesting from the other end so to speak. I start with Marsland’s 'A review of Game Tree Pruning' (said anatomy of chess program elsewhere), that too, all the relevant internet basic articles about move generation, various type of search, GNU chess source and tscp. After trying to figure out basic alpha-beta, Negamax, Mtdf (heaven forbid), 0x88, mailbox, bitboards, piece square tables, and many headaches, I (and really I mean one, as in hypothetically) decide on mailbox, basically follow the reciepe in Marsland guided by tscp and end up after some time and effort with a basic engine. Then add hash tables, then killer moves, history moves etc etc. Later null move. Following discussions on CCC add sophisticated tweaks like IID, adaptive null moves. All this gets refined and improved as time goes on and understanding increases. Parallel developments include move ordering using captures first sorted by SEE, then over time (again guided by discussion on CCC and articles) full blown ordering into hash move, winning and even captures, killer moves, non-captures sorted by history and finally losing captures. And so on and so on. Finally the whole entity is like Marsland described but with modern tweaks and hence fundamentally like Crafty, Dark Thought, GNU, etc, but not exactly copied as in at a point in time and the source looks entirely different. Similar story about evaluation. I hear about outside pawns, the lack of knowledge of which has cost me dearly. Look at Crafty’s source. Talk on CCC. Do not understand Crafty source but implement the well explained algorithm in my own way. So it goes on. Again, program tends to Crafty but not exactly copied. On the surface it looks entirely different. Maybe no bitboards at all for example. Finally I start to implement independent ideas (tweaks really) and it begins to diverge again. At which stage in this process, if ever, is one allowed to turn up to a tournament and say here I am with my program, rather than my version of Marsland/tscp/GNU/Crafty/Heinz/Kerrigan/….? At any time my contribution to the fundamental approach is minor. I did not invented minimax, negamax, alpha beta, Zorbrist hashing, bitboards, mailbox, 0x88 or whatever? Sure I use them. But I might equally well, I suppose, have just taken Crafty (after all it is better) and messed around with its code or just the data and weightings. Heck there is even an input file for doing this now (I think?) so I do not even need a compiler. I have no point here. Nor do I now know where I stand. Maybe however I now understand what Will was really asking :-/ Frank
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