Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 11:50:05 05/20/02
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On May 20, 2002 at 04:15:14, Jouni Uski wrote: >I wonder, if there will ever be significantly stronger amateur/free engine than >Crafty? With significant I mean 30-50 rating points . Of course ever is very >long time... If some engine reaches that performance may be it goes to >commercial >soon. > >Jouni As others have pointed out, Crafty is not "amateur". Bob is easily an "expert" on computer chess. You could rightly refer to him as a computer chess "professional", since Crafty is a large part (I assume) of what his job as a professor has entailed over the years, along with other computer chess programs. When I hear something refered to as "amateur", it generally means that it's lower quality. There are plenty of amateur chess engine's out there developed by computer chess hobbyists. Those are definitely amateur. Just because something is free doesn't mean it's poor quality. So what you were really asking is if there is a better "free" chess engine than crafty yet. In addition, if you read Bob's webpage where it talks about Crafty, you would know that his primary goal is not to make the strongest possible chess program that he can. He has other academic research interests such as creating more scalable search techniques, among other things I'm sure. I imagine that a guy with Bob's talents would be able to write a commercial strength chess program if that was his goal, but he has other interests, and creating a computer chess program is just his way of doing his research. He could have just as easily created a checkers program to do some of his research. Anyway, I'll stop the Bob praise post :) Russell
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