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Subject: Re: Crafty will never win a title - but so hard to beat it

Author: Pham Minh Tri

Date: 20:31:04 08/23/01

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I usually ask myself why many top commercial programs get hard to beat Crafty,
or sometimes be betted. That is very amazing because we all could stand on the
shoulders of "giant Bob", get benefit from his work, operate his Crafty, find
out any weakness, chop any code to experiment or even "paste" to our programs.
So I guess some following reasons (correct me if I am wrong or add more):

- The top programmers never look into Crafty code (unbelievable);
- Their programs never have any match with Crafty before (unbelievable);
- They do not want to be "clone" of Crafty; they try to find other ways for
their programs. Certainly, any new ways should be more difficult than common
way;
- They have to develop their own codes, pay much time and money to test them. On
this point, the open source code program has much more advantage: many people
with high knowledge and experience are helping Bob to test any new code, idea,
find any bug, etc. quicker and better;
- They could develop a program to beat Crafty, but it may lose most GMs or other
programs. IMHO, Crafty has a good balance between many things;
- Bob works for fun (as his statement), most of his time is for creativeness and
for developing important functions of chess. In other hand, the commercial
programmers work for their money. I know that most of time he has to support
customers, develop user guide or many stupid functions. He could not have more
time than Bob for creativeness and improvement of strength of their programs;
- Bob works in computer chess much longer than us. With huge experience and
knowledge, he could check, apply, implement any new idea / technique as quick
(or quicker) as any commercial programmer. As a result, Crafty always applies
the most important and latest things. The commercial programs have not enough
advantage to win it;
- Bob works harder than us ;-)

Pham



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