Author: Miguel A. Ballicora
Date: 08:20:22 12/21/01
Go up one level in this thread
On December 21, 2001 at 07:15:01, Uri Blass 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. > >Do you say that you read nothing of the comments of Crafty source code? >You do not need to try to understand the source code of Crafty in order to learn >some things about it. No, everything I learned was from r.g.c.c. an excellent chapter I read from am Enciclopaedia of AI and/or figuring out things by myself. That was part of my fun. I did things wrong (performance wise) but allowed me to learn a lot. All the bitboard stuff I developed by myself after I read a message from Bob saying that he was using "rotated bitboards". The word "rotated" gave me the clue about what he was doing. Further messages from him confirmed that I guessed in the right direction. Of course, this took me a _long_ time. Some people like puzzles or crosswords. I like this. For me, peeking at the code would have been like reading the solution on the last page. The whole generator must have taken me probably a year. >I think that I can consider my chess program as original(I think that more than >80% of the source code is original) but I copied a lot of names of variables >from tscp and even copied some lines by copy and paste. > >Here is an example: >The small function get_ms() that returns the time that the program calculated is >an example for lines that were copied from TSCP > >I do not copy things without understanding them but sometimes copying is simply >the fastest way to do things. > >How did you implement a function that return the time? >Did you remember the exact way to use the function ftime or did you copy it >from a previous application that does not have to be about chess? I just browsed the "The C programming language" by K&R to see what kind of functions I could use. Learning C.C. went along learning C. The only thing I copied from another program was the lines needed to connect my program to winboard. I did it from TSCP. I did that because I had an engine running and I was extremely eager to play with a board. Once I did it, I tossed it out when I coded it in the way I wanted (completely different, with pointer to functions and multithreading). You are doing what it could be the most efficient thing and probably after a while your program will have no lines from TSCP. However, I do not this to be efficient, I just have fun in my own way. I will copy things if I find something that is boring to me to code. The winboard plug was at one point. Regards, Miguel >Uri
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