Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 19:09:01 11/16/01
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On November 16, 2001 at 15:29:19, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >On November 16, 2001 at 02:34:27, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >>On November 16, 2001 at 01:25:08, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >> >>>On November 15, 2001 at 23:10:27, Bruce Moreland wrote: >>> >>>>On November 15, 2001 at 19:56:45, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >>>> >>>>>Why do you need a great chess programmer to make a great chess program, and not >>>>>several good chess programmers? I can understand how this might seem intuitive >>>>>to you, but you don't seem to be going on anything more than intuition. >>>>> >>>>>-Tom >>>> >>>>Which would you rather have, one good heart surgeon or two not so good ones? >>> >>>Who would you rather have design your car? One great engineer or several good >>>ones? >>> >>>-Tom >> >>One great one. I believe there are a few wonderful examples. > >Hmm, maybe it was possible a century ago for someone to design an entire car >from the ground up, but these days, if someone "designs" a car by himself, it's >kind of like saying that Gateway "designs" computers. They buy a dozen or two >parts from various sources, assemble them, and put a fancy exterior on the >result. This is not what I meant, and is not analogous to the computer chess >world. (You can not take a move generator from Program A and just drop it into >Program B to "soup it up.") > >I believe that there is enough complexity in chess programs that if you get >several good chess programmers to make a new one, they can specialize on >different parts of the program and come up with something better than any one >programmer could. > >Of course, this is just speculation, but so far it hasn't been disproven. > >-Tom I don't want to get too crazy with this, since this is a discussion about which beer is better, and that is always a matter of personal taste, but I think that we're still at the stage in computer chess where the engine is a one-person job. There are some logical places to break the work up, but they aren't in the engine itself. In particular, the opening book is a great example. But doing something like breaking between eval and search is a bad idea. And eval and search are very connected to move generation and make/unmake. So you end up with something being one organic thing. Perhaps someone could fiddle with eval terms, but a lot of search and make/unmake stuff has significant influence on what you can do in eval and how fast you can do it. I believe that Dark Thought was broken between eval and search, and it's a wonder that Peter, Ernst, and Marcus didn't kill each other. As is, I'm not sure that they all speak to each other. bruce
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