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Subject: Question for Professional Chess Programmers/Dr. Hyatt

Author: Arshad F. Syed

Date: 17:45:58 07/09/02


Before I start on my chess program, I want to get an idea of what is involved in
creating a top-notch program (preferably one that tops the SSDF list!!). I have
some questions:

1.) Is it possible to deliver a commercial quality chess program without any
chess knowledge of what constitutes a 'strong position' in a chess players view?
With only basic knowledge of the chess moves and some rudimentary concepts such
as spatial advantage etc? These could constitute the 'functional specifications'
of the program. In the event of a loss, could this loss be 'debugged' as a bug
in the alpha-beta algorithm going wrong somewhere and then fixing this?

Bottomline: In the event my program loses, I don't want to be coming back to CCC
with a message: "Here is a game I lost. Why or at what stage did I lose it?". I
simply want to start evaluating the nodes where my score went less than 1.0, for
example, and then start debugging the algorithms/code as to the cause of this
degradation.

2.) I don't want my program to be very 'machine-esque' or mechanical. I,
therefore, don't want my opening books to stretch to more than 10 moves. Will
this in anyway impact the level of play?

3.) How is the machine-learning done at this point? Is it done by post-game
analysis or by a module running in parallel with the program?

Thanks in advance and regards,
Arshad



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