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Subject: Re: The death of computerchess.

Author: Miguel A. Ballicora

Date: 07:54:03 12/21/01

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On December 21, 2001 at 06:24:04, Tony Werten wrote:

>On December 20, 2001 at 23:31:52, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote:
>
>>On December 20, 2001 at 21:15:42, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>On December 20, 2001 at 17:07:05, Peter Berger wrote:
>>>
>>>>On December 20, 2001 at 14:04:24, Christophe Theron wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>120-150 amateur Winboard chess engines, 90%-95% of them being essentially
>>>>>partial Crafty clones (I mean using the same techniques, or only a subset of the
>>>>>same techniques).
>>>>
>>>>How do you know? Some Harry Potter trick ? Alorama.
>>>
>>>He's wrong, and I am very sure of that.  The only crafty clones that I know of
>>>are Voyager, Bionic, and La Petite.  Most bitboard programs don't resemble
>>>crafty very much.  Beowulf is nothing like crafty, and neither are Pepito or
>>>Amy.  The only thing that is the same is the bitboard representation.
>>
>>Neither is Gaviota (a weak one), unless for some remote coincidence there is a
>>resemblance since I have never studied Crafty sources or any other, because I am
>>lazy. Yes, I pay attention to the comments and ideas of the people in this
>>forum, but I have mine too. Over the time I found that I handle nullmove,
>>recording the PVs and adjusting mate scores different. Ideas are also
>>convergent, for instance the way I handle null move is conceptually similar to
>>the way YACE does it (to avoid zugswang problems). The implementation is
>>different. Some extensions and pruning ideas that I am doing occurred to me.
>>Maybe they are not good, but they are Gaviota's. Maybe they have been tried
>>before? Most probably...
>
>It depends on what you call a clone. If you are looking at somebodys code, put
>it aside and then code the same idea in your program then IMO you're cloning.

Can you call something a clone when the programmer did not even even look?
Do you consider "cloning" implemented and idea read in a paper? Then everything
is a clone, nobody reinvented alpha-beta.

>If an unexperienced programmer writes an engine in a couple of months, with a
>stable evaluation, using bitboards and thinks about going multiprocessor in the
>near future then I'm quite sure he didn't even bother to put the code aside.

That is not Gaviota's case, since the first line of code was written ~5 years
ago.

Regards,
Miguel


>
>If he then asks "how does quiescence work" then I'm very sure.
>
>Tony



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