Author: Uri Blass
Date: 00:09:54 05/06/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 06, 2002 at 02:59:53, Slater Wold wrote: >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. I do not know how do you see only 15 elo or 10 elo more. In the last 3 years Fritz got progress of more than 100 elo in the ssdf list. Now it's just cleaner code, and more efficient pruning. > Gets kind boring. Search is not only about pruning but also about extensions. Uri
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