Author: Adam Oellermann
Date: 04:59:56 08/30/01
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On August 29, 2001 at 20:10:43, Bob Green wrote: >I can only laugh at myself reading the ability of you in writing a chess program >in an evening while watching the TV. > >I think of myself as a fairly accomplished programmer. I decided to write a >game program (albiet not chess.) I'm dorking around with this very part time, >but I have easily spent: > > 20 hours of reading searching papers and chess program research on the WWW > 20 hours of looking through source code of TSCP, Crafty and others > 30 hours of building a stupid program in Java > 20 hours of designing a smarter and faster one in C > 20 hours doing the move generation and _very_ simple UI > 2 hours writing a very simple eval routine > 2 hours writing a negaScout routine > 10 hours getting it right :) > 10 more hours proving it to myself > >and it still plays pretty lousy (although occationally beats me now.) > >While _anyone_ can build a chess program, the first time in you really gotta >want to do it! > >I guess since I don't have a TV this is my problem - buying one would have >knocked off weeks of development! > >Bob Green Hmm. There are some, err, disadvantages to writing code and watching TV concurrently. The thing is, it's fine while both remain fairly bland, but if either task gets interesting, you will lose the plot of the other (that is, if ( (!this_task_interesting) && (other_task_interesting) ) this_task_lose_plot() ). Major trouble can occur when both are interesting - you can end up with some incomprehensibly broken code *and* keep having to ask your wife whether the guy in the loud shirt is a baddy. Fortunately, the BBC's content selection is quite forgiving in this regard. - Adam
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