Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: The death of computerchess.

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 14:45:27 12/21/01

Go up one level in this thread


On December 21, 2001 at 10:54:03, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote:

>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.

Actually I reinvented alpha but wasn't smart enough to consider beta. Anyway,
reading a paper and then implement is IMO something completely different.

>
>>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.

As there are many more wich I was not talking about.

Tony

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



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.