Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 15:31:56 06/04/01
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On June 04, 2001 at 18:17:10, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On June 04, 2001 at 16:53:54, Dann Corbit wrote: > >This is another bitboards project, any thoughts on whether >there are goals like getting a bigger eval as crafty or >simply getting as good as crafty or ??? As you can see by looking at the code, it is not a crafty clone (though ideas have been borrowed from crafty). The one snippet of code directly lifted from crafty (and mentions crafty in its brief header) is not even used -- I just left it in as a test stub to see the performance in different sorts of positions. The goals of the project are unclear. One goal is to make a program which is (in some sense) a literate program which is easy to learn from. Another goal is to make a program that plays strong chess. I don't know that it will ever be as strong as Crafty or the other top programs, but that would certainly be nice. William Tyndale is reported to have said the following to a prominent clergyman who did not think knowledge of the Bible was important: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost." Now, I am hardly qualified to make such a boast concerning chess programming. And Colin is fairly new to bitboards also -- though he is better than it than I am and all the cleverest innovations belong to him. However, I think it a laudable goal to try to demystify chess programming. That's the major focus. Once I have the entire program abstracted into a C++ class, I may be able to make various features easily replaceable. So 12x18 chess board representation would be just as easy to teach with. Most of the "teaching" programs don't teach any of the hard stuff. Most of the advanced programs are hard to understand. This is a sort of middle ground. Now, if there are serious design flaws and fundamental misunderstandings in the code, then it is a bit [cough] less of a service to have people learn from it -- if you know what I mean.
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