Author: José Carlos
Date: 06:24:07 02/19/02
As it has been brought up again and I didn't give my opinion in the past, I'd like to say what I think about all of that. In times of Fritz 2/3, Chris was against this fast-dumb philosophy. He proposed, and then implemented, something that was meant to be in the opposite side, this is, slow-smart. This was his 'new paradigm' then. And it seems nowadays that top programs are joining the not-so-fast-but-smarter philosophy, so he was right. The users have normally a very different point of view than the programmers. Programmers _know_ that any program (not only chess ones) is nothing but a secuence of mathematical calculations. In the very end, some 1's and 0's and the hardware they 'dance' in. But the users tend to see the program as if it was a person. Tend to used words like 'creativity', 'aggresiveness', 'passiveness', and so on. Programs don't have those characteristics, they only _seem_ to have some of them. But as I said, in the end, it's nothing but a mathematical calculation that choses this or that move. Believing that a program can be 'creative' is like believing that it rains because the clouds are sad and cry: poetry, romanticism, creation of myths. Don't get me wrong, I don't say I like nor dislike poetry, that's not the topic I'm trying to discuss (actually, I'm a lover of Tal's art), what I'm saying is that that don't apply to computers. That's all. After that, Thorsten, with his passionate and human point of view, created a myth around this new paradigm, seeing in CSTal games things he had never seen in other programs games, and though they happened for reasons they didn't. And I understand him for doing that, it's difficult to resist. But when I read Chris' post, I read the key words 'tree', 'prunning', 'search', 'nodes', ... Those words prove he was doing exactly the same: searching a game-tree. He might use a different algorithm; he might use different heuristics; whatever else. But after all, he's doing the same, find a path in a game-tree. I think it is good to distinguish between fast-dumb and slow-smart, and that they can be cosidered two paradigms in computer chess programming, at least, two schools (I don't know if this direct translation is correct in english). But magic doesn't exist. It's all about 1's and 0's... José C.
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