Author: Frank Phillips
Date: 11:40:48 05/30/01
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I was hoping Johnhip an ex work colleague who tested my early versions and was watching while playing on Sunday (Monday for you?) would comment how weak the first (many) versions were, although they got progressively better. I suppose as computers get faster and faster first versions will get better and better against humans. Getting rid of bugs is one reasons that puts me off starting again – in the initial stages I think I used to do a re-write every six months or so and it seemed to help development, increasingly cutting and pasting larger chunks of the older version. But the bugs tend to get more sophisticated and harder to track down, although with post midnight programming after a day at work I still get simple ones from typos. Here is one just before CCT3 if (abs(best_w-best_b == 1)) that caused mayhem. Part of code I added to make it better and it got dramatically worse. At least the probable culprit was obvious. Writing a validation routine (to compare data updated on the fly to that regenerated from scratch) and a simple fixed depth search to compare nodes when changes should not affect the shape of the search tree helped identify many problems, particularly enpassant. As does running under two different operating systems. The number of times I have tried to convince myself that different nodes under Linux and Windows was somehow normal, is embarrassing. What still surprises me is just how good the program was/is, even with major errors – and whatever wacky evaluation term was stuck in last. I can see the logic in some things not being computable in practice and therefore evaluation being important. But I sometimes also think that computer speed is important to _overcome_ parts of my static evaluation.
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