Author: Slater Wold
Date: 23:59:53 05/05/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 05, 2002 at 17:17:56, David Dory wrote: >On May 05, 2002 at 15:38:44, Fernando Villegas wrote: > >>All those guys I mention above these lines were, in one moment, authors of good >>programs. And all those guys are by now retired from chess programming. >>Certainly there are probable other names I do not recall. What happened to them? > >Life happened, I guess. > >Some of them, I'm sure, had personal reasons for retiring, not related to chess. >In the Spracklins case, the "team" got divorced, and their project with Saitek >was not stunningly profitable. > >Yes, I believe there is a creativity factor at work. In the early days of chess >programming, it was so exciting just to see a computer play chess at all. A new >idea could generate a whole re-write, and net you a huge improvement in playing >strength. Consider the change when Northwestern's CHESS went from ver. 4.2 to >4.5. Slate & Atkins added something new - a transposition table! This was big >and exciting! Would a chess program become unbeatable with this stunning >breakthrough? > >Now, our software improvements are all rather normal, hardly edge-of-your-seat, >stuff. Software improvements have been hard to come by for many years (10-15). >As the chess program matures, you wind up working just as hard, for (generally), >smaller and smaller returns. You can't fight this - it's just the way it is. You >already eliminated the big bottlenecks in the first few years, only the smaller >one's are left to work on. As you say, the programmers aren't working with big >numbers now, it's little "decimal places". This may not be what attracted these >people to chess programming in the first place. > >I think everyone would like to give their chess program one big push, at least >once, before they retire from working on it. > >I think Bob and Ed are exceptions, and exceptional. You'll know when Christophe >no longer feels creative - he'll start saying that one's creativity can only >last for just so long! :-) > >Hopefully, that won't happen for creative or economic reasons. > >Good post - good jaunt down memory lane. > >David > >P.S. Bryant's Colossus was a checker's program. Played against Chinook several >times. Did it play chess also? I think you're right on here. Computer chess has gotten 'boring' to me in the last 3 years. Nothing big, nothing exciting. 15 more Elo here, 10 more here. When these guys were around, you're talking 100+ leaps in Elo and knowledge they never thought possible. Now it's just cleaner code, and more efficient pruning. Gets kind boring. On a side note Lang is STILL creating chess software. Perhaps he thought of the Palms and PocketPCs as the new challenge he needed.
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