Author: David Blackman
Date: 07:18:09 07/07/01
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On July 06, 2001 at 15:04:14, John Wentworth wrote: >To all the chess developers, how many hours of coding did it take you to write >your first program from the ground up? Did you develop your own book? > >I am currently working on one now and have only about 9 - 12 hours of coding >time spent. I am at the point where I can play back and forth with the program >until it runs out of book (modified Crafty book). I also spent time developing a >nice looking GUI that displays the moves made. Just trying to gage the total >time it will take me to complete it. Thanks for your input. It was a long time ago but i think it was about 4 hours to get something that played a complete game of chess very badly. Not sure if the more obscure stuff (en passent, underpromotion) was in there at that stage, but it didn't take a lot longer to put that in. This was no gui, a very weak search engine that did minimax (with a broken alpha-beta) one ply plus quiescence, very simple eval, no opening book. Probably 30 hours or so had something that played 1200 chess. Probably over a hundred hours to get to the strong club player/weak master level. I did my own opening book after a while. The programming side was a few hours. Typing in all the moves by hand and checking them took much longer. At one stage it had about 10000 positions. Then i decided i was spending too long on the opening book, and also dreading it would play a blunder from the book in a position where it could make an ok move thinking for itself. So now it doesn't have a book, and it seems to play just as well. I hope eventually to make the engine so strong that a book is irrelevant :-) I never did a gui. When i want a gui i use X-board.
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