Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 19:26:47 12/20/01
Go up one level in this thread
On December 20, 2001 at 21:59:50, Dann Corbit wrote:
>On December 20, 2001 at 21:53:53, Christophe Theron wrote:
>[snip]
>>You just have to read the questions asked here by people writing new engines.
>>
>>It's all about very classic stuffs. Alpha beta, move ordering, hash tables...
>>
>>Nothing new.
>>
>>All these questions can be asked by: "look into Crafty source code, copy,
>>paste".
>
>This is commical. Can you show any example where anyone has done this at any
>time? Maybe it will work for some tiny algorithm snippet, but not for any major
>function.
"Copy, paste" is a metaphor.
It's "copy, paste" of the METHODS not of the actual code.
When I say "Crafty clone" I mean "Crafty methods clone".
For me it's the same. I do not see where the creativity is.
I repeat that I consider writing a chess engine, even under these conditions, as
a great personal achievement. It's something that counts in your life.
What I do not understand is the reason why we should celebrate the number of
such engines. They are extremely valuable for the persons who have been able to
write one, but are they for other people?
Naturally there are exceptions. Amongst the Winboard engines there are very
valuable ones.
Christophe
>If you are going to take some idea, it will have to work in your framework.
>Crafty is a giant, interconnected machine with dozens of global variables.
>
>I think you greatly overestimate the actual ease of an operation like that.
>
>When I want to try something new, I *do* look to see what other people did. I
>might trace their code in a debugger if I don't understand it. And I will look
>at as many different implementations as I have. Then I will read a paper on it
>(yes, I do it upside down). Then I will trace it again. Now I know how it
>works. This is very much easier to do than writing it from scratch. I will
>always see things that I would do differently. I will always see things that I
>don't quite know why they did it a certain way. In any case, I doubt very much
>if anyone (outside of a pure cheater who just copies the whole thing and then
>tweaks) will really try to do this.
>
>It sounds simple to do. In fact, I think it would be a great deal harder than
>doing it yourself.
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